How many dolphins would you say, ten million?

Life is sacred.

Well, many people will say they have such a view. But if forced to elaborate on their opinion, what they really mean to say is that human life is sacred. For some people, this is religious in nature (humans have a “soul/spirit” while other creatures do not). However, there are still many people who maintain a religious viewpoint is not crucial to the particular sanctity of human life. In this case, if forced to chose between a human life and a dolphin life (for example), the human life would always be chosen because the human life has more value (whether by virtue of intelligence, civilization, societal structure, or a number of other factors). What about two dolphins versus one human life? Three dolphins? Even if there is a religious justification for the inherent value in human life, there must be some number of dolphins N such that the value in preserving N dolphins is worth the loss of a single human life.

And of course the question doesn’t end there. How many earthworms have an equivalent value to a single human life? How many acres of rainforest? How large a bacterial colony? Of course I have no way of quantifying this value in life, but the automatic assumption of (nearly) infinite value in human life does not seem reasonable to me.