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Philosophy of Value question: Life is cheap. Do you agree? Why/why not?(Read details first)?

Okay,this would fall under the theory of value. I say life is cheap. Why? Because it's treated as cheap by the world-both the natural as well as the human world. Note:This is not a tirade against inequality.It's a genuine philosophical argument. What determines the value of life? First let's clear up what I'm talking about here. What do I define as life in this question? The best way to describe it is as the "life-force", "enlivening factor" or "that which animates". The reason I'm not giving a more scientific definition is because no such definition exists. When someone dies, we may be able to fix their bodies right back up to a perfectly healthy state, but we still can't revive them. Not yet, anyway. A machine can be fixed or repaired and made to work again, but a living thing cannot. We don't yet have a scientific idea of what the "force" that animates living things is. Maybe we will in the future, but not yet. I don't want to use the word :soul" as that has a lot of other definitions as well as all sorts of religious connotations. This is a philosophy argument, not a religious one. So why is life cheap? Look around you. What determines the value of life? The only way in which we can valuate life is by seeing how it's treated. Something precious is conserved and protected, isn't it? Let's start with the human world. In our world, a person's life seems to be valued by his replace-ability. That's why great leaders are mourned by millions, while the poor and destitute are largely forgotten and abandoned, even if large numbers of them die versus just one leader. We need huge numbers of deaths among the poor just to match the shock felt by the loss of just one great political, social, business, military or other leader. In other words, the value is determined by outside factors. All people have the same "life-force" animating them, after all. There's no reason why such an "animating factor" should differ. It just has to bring people to life. Their thoughts, ideas and accomplishments are irrelevant to this force. It just keeps them living. Which means that this "life-force" itself is cheap, since the value given to a person's life is determined by outside factors, not intrinsic ones. As for the natural world, it's no different. To a conservationist or environmentalist, preserving diversity and habitat is important. They don't want species going extinct. But no one complains when you squish an ant, do they? Why not? You just killed a living thing. Even environmentalists won't complain. Because ants are plentiful. Easily replaceable. But white rhinos, whales and coral are not. Once again, it's outside factors with intrinsic value being low. What about the animals and plants themselves? Nature is all about striking a balance. If nature truly cared about preserving life, then it would have evolved a system which minimized killing. But no. It's about preserving a natural balance. Animals and plants are killed by others everyday in nature. Millions of them. Billions, if you take insects and trillions or more if you take microscopic life. Yet, not too many of the higher order creatures are killed naturally. There are millions of times more bacterial deaths than there are those of lions or elephants or giant Sequoias. Once more is about replace-ability, an outside factor. And so I put forward that life itself, the "life-force" which keeps us going, has a low intrinsic value. Any additional value added to it is due to external factors. This is an argument I'd like to test. So please let me know if you agree or disagree with proper, fleshed-out reasons. Note:I can't make this shorter while preserving clarity and subject development. I don't want crank answers. Please don't post Wikipedia links to Theory of Value unless you want to highlight a concept given there, in which case you'll have to explain what it is you're highlighting here first. And thank you for your patience and your contribution.

Public Comments

1. Depends whose life. A human would not consider their own life, and the lives of their loved ones cheap. But lives of others, that they don't really care about might be irrelevant and cheap to them. It's human nature. To be selfish So that's why everyone's life by most people is considered cheap and irrelevant. I think you understand what I mean.