Value of Life: Challenging Society’s Right to Assign Worth

Value of Life: The Misunderstandings and Misjudgments Surrounding Suicide

Should the value of life be decided by the individual itself or by any living organism that walks the face of the earth? This question has been such a controversial topic since the beginning of time and is still extremely relevant in our day and age. Any random being should not be able to determine the value of someone’s life because it is not theirs. There are various ways that humans put values on themselves or others depending on dispositional and situational attributions.

Values can be based on emotion, life, family, money, education, appearances, characteristics, outside factors, contributions to society, and many more. Instead of putting effort into determining someone’s worth, figure out your own.

An instance where society assigns value to a person’s life is suicide. Suicide is often referred to as a last resort when an individual feels they can not take the pain anymore. Society seems to view suicide as a failure on the person when, in actuality, it is their own option. The Washington Post states that suicide is a national epidemic, and instead of putting the blame on the individual, the blame should be on neurochemistry. Mental illness is covered by false stigmas that provoke such negativity in people who are suffering. Boston Children’s Hospital stated, “Research shows that approximately 90% of people who have died by suicide were suffering from a mental illness at the time.” For someone to try and put less of a value on the life of someone else who was hurting under indescribable things is absurd. Instead of tearing a person for most of the time an uncontrollable issue, we should help.

Value of Life: The Harrowing Reality of Human Trafficking and Self-Worth in Modern Society

Another occurrence when people believe they can set a value on life is human trafficking. Human trafficking is such a foul, cowardly act that can affect someone’s life forever by diminishing their worth and life. Human traffickers can be defined as several different types. For example, in the short film, The Trap: The Deadly Sex-Trafficking Cycle in American Prisons, Anthony Harris, a convicted sex trafficker, states, “You got the boyfriend pimp, you got the gorilla pimp, you got the finesse pimp, and you got the druggy pimp.” Each of them put different restrictions on the values of the victims to get them to stay. When it comes to choosing their victim, they hunt for the weak. National Human Trafficking Hotline states, “Human traffickers prey on people who are hoping for a better life, lack employment opportunities, have an unstable home life, or have a history of sexual or physical abuse.” Vulnerability is a key sign for those who manipulate the individuals being taken, sold, and used like they are nothing. No one should be able to put a value on a human’s life just because they want better for themselves.

In life, humans should not be able to have the right to determine if someone else’s value is up to their standards. We should only be able to decide what we think of ourselves and how that’s gonna control our fate in life. To put a worth on someone with things as ridiculous as material objects is such a shame because that should not have any influence on who they are as a person. If a person decides on their own, they are not enough. We can’t take away that sense of power they have as an independent individual, even though we may disagree. In this day and age, we find it so easy to judge others without judging ourselves first. We must take the fate of our lives into our own hands.

References

1. Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.
2. Singer, P. (2011). The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty. Random House.
3. Hari, J. (2019). Lost Connections: Why You’re Depressed and How to Find Hope. Bloomsbury Publishing.
4. Wyder, M., & De Leo, D. (2007). Behind impulsive suicide attempts: Indications from a community study. Journal of Affective Disorders, 104(1-3), 167-173.
5. Zimmerman, M., & Pritchard, M. (2019). A review of child sex trafficking: prevalence and characteristics. Violence and Victims, 34(1), 106-120.

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