The most important thing is to protect human life. This is the cornerstone of ethics and the basis of all morality. Through most of history, this was true in most cultures and societies.
At first glance, the last sentence seems to make no sense at all. We all know about groups of people who didn't care about human lives, killed and tortured people, and killed whole groups of people in repeated genocides. Surely, these contradict what was just said?
Liberal ideas say that human life has always been seen as the most important thing. Even authoritarian regimes agree that this is the most important value. Life is holy, valuable, and should be treasured and kept safe. But in totalitarian societies, it can be delayed, subsumed, subjected to higher goals, quantified, and applied with different rigour in the following situations:
- Quantitative: When a less bad thing stops a worse thing from happening. Sacrificing a few lives to save the lives of many is a principle that is built into things like war and medical care. No matter how deeply liberal beliefs are rooted in a culture, they all accept it. All of them send soldiers to die to protect the larger number of civilians. Medical doctors risk their lives every day to save the lives of others.
It comes down to a quantitative assessment ("the number ratio between those saved and those sacrificed") and a quality assessment ("are there privileged lives whose saving or preservation is worth the sacrifice of other lives?"). and of evaluation (no one can know for sure how these moral dilemmas will turn out; will the sacrifice save lives?).
- Temporal: When a life is given up (willingly or not) in the present to make sure that others will have a better life in the future. These future lives don't have to be more than the number of lives that were given up. A life in the future immediately makes you think of a child who needs to be protected. It's a trade-off between those who have already lived and those who haven't. The old is given up for the sake of the new. It works the same way as a savings plan: you put off spending money now until later.
The opposite of this temporal argument is in the third group (see next), which is the one about quality. It would rather give up a life right now so that another life, also living right now, can live on in the future. This is how abortion works: the life of the child is given up to make sure the mother will be okay in the future. It is against the law in Judaism to kill a female bird. It would be better to kill its children. The mother could make up for this loss by having more chicks.
- Qualitative: This version is especially bad because it tries to give "scientific" objectivity to subjective ideas and views. People are put into different groups based on how they measure up (classified by race, skin color, birth, gender, age, wealth, or other arbitrary parameters). The result of this immoral classification is that the lives of "lesser" people are seen as less "weighty" and important than the lives of "better" people. So, the former are given up so that the latter can be helped. This kind of harmful thinking can be seen in the way people thought about the Jews in Europe when the Nazis were in charge, the black slaves in America, and the aborigines in Australia.
- Utilitarian: When the death of one person helps someone else in a material or other way. This is the way that psychopaths and sociopathic criminals, for example, think and act. For them, life is a thing that can be bought and sold, and it can be traded for things that don't move. Life is traded for money and drugs.
