Another way to ask it, is if someone has more ability than that person, is he "more" of a person? It doesn't have to be pertained to money, unless you think it should be.
Poll is public. What say ye?
Complicated question.
Let's assume you have two normal people, but one has an IQ of 100 and isn't particularly good at anything, and the other has an IQ of 150 and is a gifted mathematician, or artist, or whatever gets your rocks off.
Is the smarter, more talented person more valuable?
Depends.
You don't need talent to work at a soup kitchen, do you. You don't need talent to raise nice kids. You don't need talent give to charity, care about your community, or make people's lives better.
So, who's more valuable?
Depends. Who's nicer? Who's more motivated?
While it may be true that in terms of absolute potential, the gifted person is capable of achieving more, that doesn't necessarily mean they will. In fact, indolence affects the gifted at extraordinary rates due to their increased tendency to have a mental illness or learning disabilities (yes, learning disabilities). The ordinary tend to have a smoother, more consistent trajectory to their lives.
Now, let's say you've got either one of those two individuals, and then you have someone who is severely mentally disabled to the point where they require care.
I still argue that there is no clear winner in terms of who is worth more.
Humans are pretty sad critters on their own. Compared to most animals, we're relatively weak, slow, blind, deaf, and fragile.
We're smart. But in order to compensate for all those shortcomings with our smarts, we need lots of hands to put our vision into practice.
Where we thrive is in teams. In order to function in teams, we have to be empathetic creatures who, at least to some extent, care more about others than we do about ourselves.
Caring for the human who lacks our only survival advantage is a challenge. No, they themselves will never contribute to the economy or the library as much as most other humans will. But I'd argue they do contribute to humanity.
Caring for the disabled among us strengths our empathy and cooperation. And we've always cared for the sick and weak going all the way back to our cave days, much more so than most animals do.
And has anyone noticed that the more we care about them, the more we try to do right by them, the better our societies become?
Are we not kinder, more ethical, more peaceful, as our societies get more cooperative in caring for everyone, even the weak among us? On DP, is it not true that even many the most economically conservative posters believe that the disabled are entitled to social welfare?
Do we not enjoy helping the helpless?
And every once in a while, do we not discover that in helping the helpless, we unlock a hidden potential in them that no one realized was there for millenia?
Consider the severe, non-verbal autistic. They used to be people that we threw in institutions, or further back, simply abandoned to die.
And now, because we choose to help them, we are finding that they are capable of things like this.
Teen Locked in Autistic Body Finds Inner Voice - ABC News
A completely non-verbal teenager assumed to have the mind of a toddler, but as it turns out, she writes almost as well as I do.
Throughout history, children like this were lost to the world up until the last 40 years: the age of computers.
Sometimes, the disabled among us are not incapable. We simply haven't learned how to unlock their capability yet.
Whether or not this child, or any other disabled person, ever achieves as much as a normal person likely will, at the very least, is there not a value to humanity in the way we engage our empathy in caring for them?
Trying to rank humans on tiers is some complicated business. And ultimately, I think it is more worth our energy to simply do what we're best at: caring for each other.
