What is Worth | Michael B.

I guess everything is worth its weight in life.

Not weight as in ounces or pounds, but as in the moral debt owed to an organism by merit of its living existence.

This is still relative. A father has a moral debt to his children that he does not have to other children. I’d go so far to say that ultimate moral value is a function of genetic similarity and your gene pool’s ability to assimilate new genetic material.

Nonliving things only have value in relation to what living things do with them.

My family would certainly be worth more to me than a man-made machine intelligence or a hostile alien species. I do believe the aliens would be valuable because of their being alive and it would be beneficial to everyone to find a peaceful solution to our species’ conflict, but if it came down to life on Earth or life from Sirius IV, I’d like to think I’d be somewhere among the human resistance.

All living things on Earth are valuable to each other, not just because of the mutual exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen, not just because living things need to eat each other to sustain themselves, not just because humans share massive portions of genetic material with them, and not just because life comes in endless forms most beautiful to behold. Nonhuman creatures have value to individual humans because viruses can carry genes from one species to another, and these foreign genes can sometimes manifest themselves in a creature’s offspring (That’s called lateral gene transfer, folks!). This means that the evolution of all life on Earth connects each species including humans in a web of viral exchange.

I was a biology major, though, so I might be biased. Still, I bet I’m right to say that this writing is only worth what you put into it relatively.

Michael Brodnicki

Writer

Michael is a commercial and fiction writer/illustrator based out of Dallas/Ft. Worth. His primary focus is science fiction although he loves loving love with us here at Love's Presents!

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