The Quantity of Life

[[I recently spoke with one of the people in charge of a school magazine at my university who I offered to write an article for for their March issue. She seemed excited, so I've been holding off writing this article because I thought they would give me a chance to present this idea to them. However, I haven't heard back from them in a month and since the e-mag is published monthly I suppose they really aren't interested in working with me. Please pass this around so I can get more people to read it than I would have otherwise in their little e-mag ;P ]]



Most of our advances in the last 1000 years have been advances in quantity, not quality. For the last few hundred years, people have confused quantity of life with quality of life. Instead of providing better lives (quality) for individuals, our modern advances have provided more life (quantity) for individuals.  Medical advances add more time to our lives (chemo therapy for example). Business advances provide more money to our lives. High-tech advances have made our lives less hard (word processors), so that we have more time or energy and we can further invest our time and energy into other things. These advances do not improve the quality of our lives, they only give us more! The only way to improve the quality of life is through refining our understanding of the human sciences.

What is the difference between qualifying and quantifying?
"To quantify" an idea means to turn that idea into a measurable number value, whereas "to qualify" an idea means to turn that idea into something competent and authoritative. Some athletic competitions involve qualifying before being admitted into them. This involves passing certain criterion, such as being a winner at several smaller venues, or proving ones' worth in test trials. A local baseball team, for example, might have to win three out of six games in order to compete in a special tournament, or they might have to provide registered, standardized uniforms to all of their players before qualifying to play in a special league. Quantifying that same team would involve measuring a specific trait of the team, such as the average number of strikes to base ratio, or the average number of points per game. Although quantified information is useful, unlike qualified information it has no purpose. 



When a business produces a product,--let's use a t-shirt company, for example--they can choose to make the shirt cheaper, and therefore produce more of them, or they can make them of better quality, or capable of meeting or exceeding certain conditions. Making them more affordable might make them more available for everyone, but that doesn't make the product better, it just makes it more accessible.
As an example, in certain harsh terrains of the world, the locals handcraft their own winter coats out of materials found in the area such as sea lions or yak. These coats are expensive and often times illegal to purchase or make for yourself, but they are of high quality. They can withstand subzero temperatures and keep the wearer unharmed by weather conditions. Certain winter jackets, on the other hand, might be cheaper to purchase and easier to obtain, but they are not of the same quality--they can't survive extreme weather conditions with ease.



Qualified information is information that has a distinct purpose or meaning. Knowing that your baseball team is allowed to compete in not just in a recreation league but in a minor league gives your team some credibility. Having a winter jacket that is fit for surviving extreme weather conditions or a swimming suit that has less water resistance makes these products of higher quality..

Our society views the quality of our products as the quality of our lives.Practically the only "qualifying" that our society has relied in is whether a person has enough money to afford the greatest quality products. In other words, how much money someone possesses is an indication that they are living a quality life, but that's not true at all! What about the hypothetical situations where the poor families have found more purpose and meaning to life that the rich families, such as what occurs in a Christmas Carol? Or what about when a wealthy man realizes that his money can't buy him happiness?

The only real way to improve the quality of our lives is to make our lives more meaningful and purposeful. Literally, we can qualify our lives when we pass certain criteria, such as a physical endurance test, or a mental challenge. Realistically, though, these tests need to be valid and reliable, and the next question is what tests are valid measures of the quality of life--or rather, that's always been the question, because we know that money isn't always a valid measure of the quality of our lives and neither is the possession of goods.

Asking this question is about like asking whether one person's life is more valuable than another person's. In order to accept that a quality life is possible, we must also accept that certain peoples' lives are worth more than other peoples'. And why not? Utilitarianism admits that the life of two people is greater than the life of one person (the quantity of life), so it should come as natural to also accept that one person's life CAN be more valuable than another person's [assuming that Utilitarianism isn't flawed].

Can we make human life have more quality in the same way that we make products have more quality? This is a trick question, because we can qualify life by improving it using the same techniques used on products, but we can't qualify all life because each of us is different. Grade A apples can't be compared to Grade A oranges--certain aspects of them can, but overall an apple is an apple and an orange is an orange.

Before any comparisons can be made and before we can establish a criteria for the quality of life, we need to discover what makes a life a life. We can certainly say that this apple is sweeter than that orange, because both the apple and the orange are fruits and fruits are typically sweet. If we measured the quality of the fruit by its sweetness, its ripeness, and its nutritious content, then yes, we can compare the quality of the apple and the orange--just as long as the comparison is valid and reliable.

There are a lot of complex theories out there that seek to define human life. As a human race, we have yet to come to consensus on what constitutes human life. We even debate at what moment life begins and if it has really begun yet. As it stands right now, there is too much confusion on what constitutes human life, but that doesn't stop us from knowing what isn't life. We know a lot about death. We can pinpoint the exact second that death occurred. We recognize when many people have died at a tragic event. We focus a lot on death, and because we know what death is, we also know what is not human life.

I don't intend to solve the question of what constitutes a quality life in a single article, but I do intend to point out that the accumulation of wealth poses some tricky questions about the quality of our lives. I can prove, however, that money isn't an aspect of death, because after a person dies their money is useless to them. I would like to think, though, that life and death are related and that the things that make life have quality are the same things that make death have quality.

What are your thoughts?