We should recall that things to which people assign value related to humans are:
- An individual’s life and personal experience of the world (e.g. doing things that give them joy) can be considered to have value.
- Their economic contributions, either in bulk labor, or in ingenious discoveries that typically we attribute to individual inspiration.
- The value they give to other people in their social interactions.
- Political and military contributions, and other special case situations like policing or hazardous material remediation.
- Their value in the afterlife and the supernatural significance of their existence.
It would be difficult for us generally to consider an individual’s life value, and very difficult to draw any general (as in, valid for the true religion, or valid for all religions, which is not a thing, they make mutually exclusive claims) conclusion about their supernatural value. We can say things like “in a slavery society, personal life value is negative”, but that’s not a general conclusion.
What, in 2023, we can state, is that there is no need of humans, to perform economic activities. The unskilled labor pool is massive, and based on experience from societies (e.g. the American continent) that converted from the use of slaves, it’s highly likely that any need for skilled labor can be met with additional education of the existing people.
As for ingenious discoveries, the primary limiter to scientific discovery is economic; that is, we can discover more useful things, if we can put more money onto experimentation, and shift/train existing labor onto those activities. Hence, if we were to consider that the society generally were efficient and well-run, the primary driver of scientific progress at the present time, would be economic.
The matter of the contribution of the value of social interactions is not clear. To make an objective determination, we would want to define a scale, on which we could sum up the positive and negative aspects of an individual’s contribution. To give some indications: if you want to be all alone at a national park, then at that moment, others’ social contributions are zero. However, when you want to go to the mall, club, game, or other social venue to be with people, then their social contributions are positive. Your social contribution is positive when people want to marry you and zero when they reject you. Aside from the obvious points/ambiguity about measuring the individual social benefit, we also have to consider the interchangeability criteria; is an additional and/or different person adding _new_ benefits, that existing people could not, if placed in these situations? If you say, the new person is going to be a supermodel, perhaps that’s absolute value added. If however, you replace that person with a middle aged, chubby male, who replaces someone else that had built a reputation and with whom others had become familiar, that’s not adding social value over any other person out of the world’s bulk humanity. Hence, I think the macro average answer becomes someone’s general likeability: for example, beautiful young women contribute additional social value over replacement. Thus, I think at best, we only can predict average positive social value to very specific individuals who would be born.
As for positive political and military contributions: look at the voting records in the Western democracies, and the trash they put into office. When you have, as in the American Empire in 2016, 90% of the population either not voting, or voting for crooks, you can’t talk about an average person’s political contribution being positive. As for military contribution: certainly the soldiers are brave, but you also have to consider whether the tasks they are assigned contribute value. For example, ~20 years of Western military inputs were given to Afghanistan, for no grand strategic benefit. So, while these men and women lost their lives, it wasn’t in service of a goal that provided grand strategic benefit to society. We could consider that e.g. the education of Afghan women was a benefit, but there’s no reason why we had to tell thousands of people to die, if the only point was to educate some people, somewhere in the world. Moreover, the primary means of fighting strong industrial states, is technological e.g. ICBMs with nuclear warheads.
To assign value to the production of more cannon fodder, we have to think that:
- We cannot get enough cannon fodder out of the surplus of people already living in the world
- Hence, we are going to need this cannon fodder more than ~20 years from now (because they have to grow up), to fight wars that will happen then
- As that means those wars will be catastrophic, we now need to undertake all preparations for total war, to include the widespread use of nuclear weapons
In other words, only a conflict on the scale of Armageddon would require additional manpower, but that also means you can’t say the humans you are raising, are anything more than your war slaves, whose lives will be full of work, until those people are eradicated by nuclear fire.
Hence we come to the summary:
- Bulk labor surplus and resource constraints on research means an average human does not contribute net economic value
- Bulk humanity generally, means an average person isn’t more socially useful than any of the other people in the world
- Horrific political history, incompetent military affairs, bulk labor surplus, and the futility of preparing for Armageddon, means an average person isn’t likely to deliver much political or military value
- So, we are left to muse about factors that are hard to quantify and socially dependent, like whether a slave’s life is worth living, or whether this new person we bring into the world, will go to heaven, or instead hell