Why is Human life considered precious?

What a fatalistic way to look at things **shrugs**

Life is considered precious, because of evolution. From the Wheel, to modern technology, to hybrid cars and eventually getting off the grid. Mankind has grown, evolved and will continue to march forward into progress.

Without Humanity, the earth would be simply one of the other nine planets on the solar system either with no life, or inconsequential life which has developed nothing.

Well, the only intelligent being that you can actually ask this to are other human beings, right? That alone is going to affect the answer to that question.

I don't think we value human life more for a complex reason such as sentience or superior intellect or anything like that. We value human life simply because we're humans. If an ant or a plant was capable of self-awareness and self-reflection, I'm sure they'd value their own lives as much as we value ours. That's pretty much all there is to it.

I agree. As humans, we naturally care about other humans in a general sense and for our families and friends in particular. Why? Probably because doing so makes it easier for us to function as social animals, from an evolutionary point of view. I don't think it's wrong or stupid to feel this way. Yes, in the grand scheme of things everything is meaningless. However, it doesn't do any harm to care about other people, so why not do so? It makes life more pleasant, after all. I think a lot of people on this thread are hating on humanity as a whole for little reason. So what if people care about humanity? There isn't anything that is objectively more important, simply because objectively caring about something more than humanity is an oxymoron.

It's only considered as precious if you do think it's precious. Precious is relative, because what might be worthless for you might have much value for me, and vice versa.

I do personally think my life, and those who are close to me to be very precious. But, I don't think yours, or your close family, or girlfriend are, simply because I don't know you and I don't care, vice versa. Don't get offended, it was just an example.

My point is that a thing becomes precious if they have that mindset.

All I gotta say on this topic:

You criticizing "People's life aren't equal to me, some deserve to die." while advocating, in an entire thread, that American, Japanese, South Korean, and Vietnamese soldiers should fight and die in a war against another country and it's allies, Iran, Syria, China, because they "Threatened Americans" again, and that makes you feel insecure.... FUCKING SERIOUSLY!?!?! You are so funny!

Honestly, without humans, there would be less extinct/endangered animals, more hospitable areas for them to live, and no one fucking up there ecosystem/global climate. We don't make earth any more special than any other planet. It's this planet that's special, without it we couldn't live, and yet look at what we do to it. If you think this planet is "Lucky" to have a leech, that is killing it from the inside out, your funny! Like our inventions make anything better for anyone other than ourselves. Life would exist, quite better off even, without us.

I would have ignored you but... It was just so hypocritically funny!

OT: Because people hate to lose anything they have, anything that belongs in their group (who boost the power of their group, or lower it by the loss), and Morale values implied by the influence of religion in some societies.

Because humans have the capacity to ponder this and because humans are egotistical and put themselves on a pedestal.

It's only natural that humans would care about who's at the top of the food chain and how we hold human life precious. It's practically in our instinct to survive and dominate. As cynical as that sounds, it's how we managed to make it this far. Personally, I like to think that human life is precious because it doesn't last forever, and we within that finite time we are capable of smart and creative ways to change the world.

Don't forget guys that there WAS such things as slavery and terrible things like feeding human corpses to pets.

Like a few others have already mentioned before, it's a survival thing. As a society, we'd naturally want to protect ourselves; the most expedient way to do so is to get everyone to agree that whichever group you belong to has inherently more privilege than whichever group you're not in.

And well... the people who see "anything superior as evil" tend to also be the ones who get left behind and bite the dust in the end... if the thing labeled as "evil" truly was superior such that it could give an advantage over even sheer numbers.

And let's face it. If the plants and animals we ate banded together and declared war on us, I'm sure a lot of us would find the notion of "human life is more precious" challenged and take PETA a little more seriously. Since they're not though...

Because people die when they're killed.

Haha, this was a good one :D!

Would +rep it if repping worked.

Maybe human life is important because as I saw earlier, people are the only ones who can make such things, this website, the structures you see, the media you use/have, and a bunch of other things. Kind of explained in anything with people on brink of extinction or maybe even just a few in peril, it's only when you see that human life is finite and stuff has to be done with it, that it is considered precious. If talking about another human's life, if we ignore the chance of reincarnation and assume when people die they'll never come back, we consider it precious because if they are killed before they die of old age, even if they die of old age, all the people they have been around, all who care about them, when they know they are dead, they will most likely have sad feelings about it. So life is precious, human life at that, because we never know when it'll end and what will happen to everything else after it ceases to be.

By virtue of being ours. As a species, we're fairly narcissistic. We think that we're perfection, and that we rule over everything. So it stands to reason that we think our life is inherently more valuable than any other.

I just don't know and likely won't know what I'm talking about. Basic survival instincts I guess. That and we hate to see our loved ones die. I supposed its relative because though I don't like hearing about how 6 people died in a bus crash or something like that, it would destroy me emotionally if my daddy died in the same way.
And what about religious reasons? You could have spiritual beliefs tell you that your life is a precious gift...
And I know that some cultures deem all life precious, and if they had to kill to survive, they were sure to get all they could out of the animal so that nothing of Their god's creations are wasted, and they'd sometimes say a prayer for the fallen beast to accent its soul to the afterlife.

And a thought that just occurred to me. Human life was probably precious enough that aincent cultures sacrificed humans to appease them or something. It sorta has something to do with it

Because human girls/boys are hot (well, some of them...)

We are selfish, some believe we are superior, some believe we were sent by a being higher than ourselves, and some believe we have an objective more important than any other life form.

You honestly can't discuss this topic with shutting out the fact that humans as a race are sentient. That's about the only thing that's keeping them together.

One word... Instinct.
Is it not most cases where when something is attacked it will either flee or attempt to defend itself because it wants to live?