What is the value of one life?
“The night can evoke both hope and dread, but it is also a time and place for freedom and transgression that offer such fertile ground for creation.”
I went to the MAAT museum (museum of Art, Architecture and Technology) in Lisbon to get inspired by the exhibition “Traverser la nuit” from Antoine de Galbert. I chose this exhibition as the architecture of the museum always inspired me when passing by on my way to university as well as the night means something special to me. I made the most incredible memories during the night, lying under the start in the middle of nowhere and seeing the Milky Way clearly. This is really when I feel the purest and nothing else in life matters. Experiencing the night in a different setting was the motivation to go to this exhibition.
Walking through the collection and letting impressions, feelings, and sounds sink in, I recognized various emotions going through my body and mind. The night empowers and represents so many different facettes: from dusk and dawn, from blindness and disorientation to better days on the horizon, calmness and hope. The night is a true source for imagination, dreams and visions for the future. The different exhibitions rooms were set up along those feelings and emotions. There were rooms full of hope visualizing the night being broken through by the sun or drawings of the variety and infinity of the universe.
However, there were also areas where the atmosphere felt very heavy, daunting and frightening. In one of these rooms with the title “Os náufragos da noite” (Night’s castaways) I found this piece which made me think and reflect on life. It was built like a suitcase which could fit exactly the “item value” of one life in form of a human body.
At first, I thought that this was a weird piece of art and I wanted to leave the room quickly as the mood in there was scary, depressing and dark. However, the longer I stared at the box and thought about why someone would come up with something like this and what their intention behind this could be I started to think more and deeper about it.
“What makes a life valuable is everything you carry within your body and inside your mind.”
I begun to realize that your life is just about you and nothing else — nothing else matters. The value of one life is pure: it is not about how much money, houses, cars, shoes or bags you own. What makes a life valuable is everything you carry within your body and inside your mind. Your mind and body holds all the importance in life: your memories, health, experiences, ideas, love, creativity, life learnings, happiness, sadness, excitments…
Breaking this down to the essentials, we could come up with the following equation:
Value of one Life = Value of all Experiences
There might be moments in life, when people realize this and ground themselves again. Especially now, facing all the madness going on in the world, people notice again what really matters in life such as your family and living in a safe environment. However, oftentimes we tend to forget about it and worry too much about what others think about us, how they perceive us, and how we can impress them. The question is: why do we do this just to feel bad in the end? We would be so much happier when we stop comparing ourselves with others based on superficial and materialistic things, even though the value of one life is based solely on our experiences — because this is what makes us rich in the end.
While I walked through the exhibition “Traverser la nuit” it created many different emotions and feelings: positive and hopeful as well as intimidating and anxious ones — representing the facettes of the night. This way I felt on the one hand exhilarated and on the other hand got impulses about the rarity of life. I observed that life is like the night — there are various phases: good and scary ones, hopeful and bright ones. And this is what life is all about, what forms us and makes it valuable in the end. Experiencing this exhibition made me realized this and I learnt more about the different faces of the night.
As I researched on further insights on the value of life I found the philosophical locus classicus for this view by Immanuel Kant which I find very interesting and adds well to the before mentioned thoughts. He claims, that humans have a dignity but not a price because whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent. Thus, the claim that human lives are priceless is not merely that no monetary value can ethically be placed upon them, but that no exchange value of other goods can be placed upon them. However, the pricelessness of human life does not imply that all lives are of equal value. Some lives might be more priceless than others just as some infinites are greater than others. But a distinct but correlated claim is that all human lives are of equal value as no price can be assigned to lives. There is no obvious basis for comparative judgments of their value and they should be treated equally.
So what do you think: Do all humans have the same value or are there difference based on e.g. their experiences or wisdom?
Bayles, Michael D. “The Price of Life.” Ethics, vol. 89, no. 1, University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 20–34,
