How valuable is human life? How valuable is my life?

Living here at DBTC these are two questions which I find myself asking a lot.

Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and humanism all preach the equality of every human being. Every person is of equal and infinite value. According to these traditions the value of a human life cannot be attached to a person’s level of productivity or usefulness. We have a value greater than what we do. This is a tenet of belief in which most of us would assent to believe.

But living here in the Philippines the reality of inequality is powerfully evident to me every day. The Philippines is a deeply unequal society. The richest 10% earn more than twenty times more on average than the poorest 10%¹. The rich live like middle class Europeans or Americans whereas the poor live in slums without running water and without access to decent education or health care. Virtually every service here is privatised, state provided services are very sparse and of a very low quality. If you have money then all is well, if you don’t then life is very hard.

Already we have had a student drop out of his studies because his grandmother became ill, the families already stretched income couldn’t stretch far enough to pay for medicine, so he left his training in order to work and be able to buy the necessary medicine. It is possible that he will never get another chance to study.

Privatised health care means that the poor are thrown into poverty by illness and the destitute are simply left to die. Private education means that the wealthy get their children well educated and into well paid jobs while the children of the poor are taught in larger classes, and with fewer resources (sometimes without even paper and pens), so all but a few are destined to end up in poorly paid jobs.

Many of our students have to work in the evenings to earn money despite attending 11 hours of college every day. Lots of them try to eat only once in the day so as to save money.

Being here has made me appreciate the importance of public institutions like a good postal service, a good library service, clean water and reliable transport networks. Universal access to these things is a hallmark civilised society; in the Philippines they are available only to the wealthy.

To live in a land where one life is so obviously not of equal value to another is deeply unsettling. I don’t deceive myself into believing I come from a land where things are any more civilised. The globalisation of economics means that inequality is the responsibility of all of us; be it visible outside our front door or thousands of miles away.

Words about equality are very cheap! Sadly most of us live within the sphere of influence of an economic worldview which acts to commodify everything and everyone into a unit of production then hang a price tag on it. None of us are worth anymore than the value of our function. In a world where everyone and everything has its prices there are inevitably those not worth the spending money on to keep alive.

At the heart of all of this is a sickness of which it is hard to make sense. Dwelling too long on these questions forces me to question whether the world would really gives a damn about saving my life had I been born in a slum in a poorer part of the world. Confronted by the shocking negative answer to that question I become driven to try to earn the privileges acquired by an accident of birth. But this striving in turn leads to dead-ends; trying to earn our right to be considered valuable can only ever lead to dehumanisation and all too often it leads to mental illness.

But what alternatives do we have?

¹ http://www.newint.org/columns/country/2004/09/01/philippines/