alt Hacker News> Value is not set by what you put into it, it is set by what people are willing to pay for it.
Is a human life literally worthless, because they never pay to be born?
The map is not the territory, the price is not the value.
Replies
WalterBright • yesterday at 11:06 PM
Some people will pay a great deal to have a baby. Some will pay to abort their baby.
What value something has is totally dependent on who is valuing it.
More formally, it's the Law of Supply and Demand.
gzread • yesterday at 7:36 PM
It can be empirically observed that human lives are not assigned much value when choosing to start a war.
History clearly establishes that the open market assigns substantial value to human life. We just happen to have outlawed trading in it. Human life has been deemed worthless by force of law.
Less facetiously, you're committing a semantic error.