Value of Human Life

Wired News Reports(link):

The sudden influx of drug companies to India resembles the gold rush frontier, according to Sean Philpott, managing editor of The American Journal of Bioethics.

Why ?

Companies are attracted to India not only because of the huge patient pool and skilled workers, but also because many potential study volunteers are "treatment naïve," meaning they have not been exposed to the wide array of biomedical drugs that most Western patients have, said Stefan Ecks, a lecturer in social anthropology at the School of Social and Political Studies in Edinburgh who recently published a paper on the marketing of antidepressants in India.

The article ends with the reason:

"Third World lives are worth much less than the European lives. That is what colonialism was all about," said Srirupa Prasad, a visiting assistant professor of medical history and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Hmm. What does value of human life depend upon ? My theory is, that in modern-day world, it depends upon two things:

• personal economic status,
• and economy of country/nation-state you live in.

So though personally a developed country poor human has lesser value with respect to his own country-men, but he still will be more valuable then its developing country counterpart.

By nature, life survives by exploiting another life, which automatically becomes a lower life. And for humans, survival means not just living, but fullfillment of wants. The more you are capable of exploiting, the more is the value of your life, the more your chance of survival (survival implying fullfillment of wants here, like want to live, want to good food, clothes, shelter, ferrari, beach-house, want to equal opportunity, justice, want to owning the justice department etc.).

And your capability of exploiting (and thus your value of life), I believe, depends upon your personal economic status, and the collective economic status of the nation-state that you live in.

Now here is where Ethics come in. What is an Ethic ? It is a correctional behaviour by humans and for humans, so as to minimize the disparity between the value of different human lives, so as to provide an equal opportunity towards survival, to them.

Ethics exist because humans have memory, personally, and collectively, and because humans have the want to survive. It is this memory combined with want to survive, which makes them intelligent, and enables them to demand equal opportunity towards survival, of theirs, or others, survival here being fullfillment of wants, including want to live.

Now if you have too much of ethics, or too many of wants, you will screw up the system. British had too many wants, they colonised India. Indian socialists had too many Ethics and too many hidden wants, they sacrificed development for social-welfare and keeping in power . And so the India as a nation state is a poor economy today, and Indians are thus being exploited as cheap labour, guineas for clinical testing, dismantling of junk, and what not.