Religion seems to be one, if the Crusades are any indication. Legal liberty, equality… basically anything that someone’s sacrificed their life for, that’s not itself a means to save lives, is a sacred value by definition.
I feel that sacrificing your own life doesn’t really count. If anything, it has to be something that you kill or sacrifice someone else’s life for; but the other person’s life has to count as a sacred value. It’s not clear that outgroup people’s lives count as sacred. On the other hand, maybe sending people to war counts as trading the sacred value of life—for what exactly, though?
Legal liberty and equality are a bit hard to actually trade; to the extent that equality is traded, though, it is very routinely exchanged for what one should think are lowest-tier goods, no?
On the other hand, I’m not sure were this leaves. Maybe this mess is just the usual humans not having a proper utility function and has nothing to do with tiers of increasing sacredness in particular.
Religion seems to be one, if the Crusades are any indication. Legal liberty, equality… basically anything that someone’s sacrificed their life for, that’s not itself a means to save lives, is a sacred value by definition.
I feel that sacrificing your own life doesn’t really count. If anything, it has to be something that you kill or sacrifice someone else’s life for; but the other person’s life has to count as a sacred value. It’s not clear that outgroup people’s lives count as sacred. On the other hand, maybe sending people to war counts as trading the sacred value of life—for what exactly, though?
Legal liberty and equality are a bit hard to actually trade; to the extent that equality is traded, though, it is very routinely exchanged for what one should think are lowest-tier goods, no?
On the other hand, I’m not sure were this leaves. Maybe this mess is just the usual humans not having a proper utility function and has nothing to do with tiers of increasing sacredness in particular.