Let’s imagine for a minute that everyone in the world is a mature adult and is not pursuing any goals at all. Time keeps passing, but no one is doing anything at all. If that became the situation right now, what would make one person more valuable than another person?
Your mental ability isn’t what would make you more valuable. No one is doing anything at all. It wouldn’t matter how smart you are.
It’s not your physical attributes. No one is doing anything. No one cares how tall, how short, how strong, weak, or what your disabilities are. No one cares what your skin color is.
It’s not your religion. Religions solve the is-ought problem. The is-ought problem says if your goal is to get to heaven, then you ought to do these things. But no one is doing anything, which includes the things needed to get to their heaven (even Christians have a “profess with your mouth” action).
It’s not your beliefs. Your beliefs are only activated when you take action. Until you take action, your beliefs just live in your head; they’re not part of the collective, shared reality yet. I can believe that I am a father, but unless I take action to successfully create a baby or step into the role of acting as a child’s father, then I’m not a father. The fact that I believe I am a father doesn’t make it true; the belief is only true if it is activated by the action. And in this imaginary world, no one is taking any actions. So it’s not your beliefs (without actions) that are going to differentiate one person from another.
It’s also not your desires. I can desire to kill other people, but if I am not doing anything, then my psychopath serial killer desires are not being manifested into action. I’m not actually a serial killer, even if the desire is present.
It’s not your wisdom. Wisdom is only useful when it is applied, and since no one is doing anything, no one cares.
In fact, there’s nothing that distinguishes us one from the other. We are all the same. It takes an action to distinguish one person from the next. And more than an action, an action that is directed towards a particular purpose. In other words, a goal. When we have a goal, then we can say that someone is valuable or not in relation to how they direct their actions towards achieving that goal.
If there are not differences between humans, are there similarities?
In this situation, where everyone is doing nothing, would there be similarities shared across all?
Well, everyone would die. If no one is collecting food, then everyone’s biological systems would eventually cause each person to die. Death is a limitation that we all face. We also face entropy in our bodies. We could get cancer, we could become sick, we could have mind wilting diseases seize us. Each of us are aware of these possibilities occurring to us, and the older we get, the more we are aware that we are owned by time, not ourselves.
Further, each human has a biological drive for survival. It’s not conscious; it’s something we have each inherited on an animal level. This drive for survival is shared. There are other biological drives that humans share. Some of those drives are not unique to humans. For example, all mammalians share certain emotional systems, which are known as the SEEKING and GRIEF systems. The SEEKING system is the source of humans rewards-driven behavior and the energy that gives us life. The GRIEF system drives humans to develop and maintain interpersonal relationships. When we lose the relationships that are close to us, then we have a sense of loss. We all want family, and when we lose our family, that loss is painful to each human.
There is one more important way that we are the same: as humans, we all share consciousness. Our consciousness is what gives us the power to choose and to self-regulate our biological drives.
So what is similar: Our mortality is the same, our biological drives are universal, and we have all evolved into consciousness.
Why do these similarities and differences matter?
There is a maxim in philosophy going all the way back Aristotle, and it says: “The same things should be treated the same, no exception.” If there are two identical, twin children, both boys, and the step-mother decided at birth to love one and spurn the other at birth, we would call the step-mother a monster. Both children are the same, both children are equally deserving of love. It is immoral to make an exception between the children.
Here’s what this means in practice: If you think of yourself as an exception, you’re immoral. I’ll start with an obvious example to illustrate this point.
One way that we are the same is we all have a need to belong. Our need to belong drives us to form and maintain interpersonal relationships with each other. Each person has a need for these relationships, and losing these relationships causes the person physical and mental pain. People are motivated to go to extremes to maintain these relationships, and no human in the species wants the relationships that they value as important to be deprived from them. In this way, we are all alike.
If I were to think, “I will kill the people that he cares about”, then I have deviated from the standard of alikeness. I would not want someone to kill the people that I care about, but to think that I have any right to kill someone else’s important people is to apply an exception. “I don’t want to lose my family, but I believe that I can take away their family.” Whenever we have such inconsistency in our thinking, this is the definition of immorality.
Of course, it is complicated by intervening factors, such as in situations of self-defense where you have to prioritize two alike things against each other. For example, self-defense situations pit each person’s need for security in their body against another person’s need for belonging. This is why you can get a criminal who is putting other people’s physical life into jeopardy, and when those threatened defend themselves, the mother can still lament the loss of her baby. To the mother, she prioritizes her need for belonging over the defender’s need for security. And, of course, the defenders prioritized their need for security over the aggressor or the aggressor’s mothers need for belonging. Neither the defenders nor the mother are wrong because both have real needs and both are acting rationally with regards to the alikeness standard of morality.
When you think of yourself as an exception, it’s normally something that is pretty subtle. Frequently, it’s in the form of either self-deception or a distorted view of the world. For example, maybe you got angry because people never put the laundry baskets back into the laundry room. They just keep their clothes in the laundry basket, not putting their clothes away. In order to justify that anger or even allow myself to keep feeling it, I have to consider myself as an exception. I have to believe that putting away laundry baskets is important and that anyone who does not do this is causing me an inconvenience and that I am important enough that I shouldn’t be inconvenienced in this way. It doesn’t take into account the other person at all. All of this even exists because I have a goal of putting my laundry away.
This maxim isn’t the same as the golden rule, which is to “treat others like you want to be treated.” The golden rule is subjective; a man catcalling a woman on the street may want to be catcalled themselves. They are treating the woman like they want to be treated without any consideration for the woman’s point of view. Instead, the “Treat the same things the same” maxim is universal and objective.
Conclusions
- Value is relative. Unless you have a standard to compare two things against, they are going to be the same. If humans did not have goals that were important to them – if everyone was doing nothing – there would be no way to compare two humans to each other. There would not be differences; only similarities.
- Same things should be treated the same, no exceptions.
- The things we do are because we are trying to achieve certain goals. If a goal is important to us, then certain traits that people might possess will become important to us.
- We have to remember that people are not their goals. Other people’s goals can always change. People are just like us – thinking, eating, dying. The only things that distinguish us are what goals we each set.
- Considering something as more or less valuable is a characteristic of goals. Goals are what are different. People are equal. People all have an equal amount of value.