Over the weekend I came across an interesting thought experiment with my friends. It started out with a simple claim; that some jobs are surely higher in their value than others. A doctor, for instance, is much more valuable to society than a garbage man is. For reasons I'm not sure of (perhaps I just really wanted to argue with some one) I chose to challenge this claim, backing the complete polar opposite in arguing that no, every job in a society must be as equally important as any other. I had simple reasoning for this. Every job performs a certain function of a society. This does not assume that societies must be inherently efficient, waste can and does occur, but because every job performs a certain function for a society, and because every job performs a different task from each other (otherwise there would be no need to distinguish between or invent different jobs) every job must be indispensable to that society until that time when the function that job was aimed at to perform is no longer required. And because every job is aimed at fulfilling a required function of the society every function must be treated as an equal one and hence as equally important. But I can hear you saying are not some functions more important than others? Surely a president is a much more important job than that of a garbage man. The answer is no. The important thing to distinguish between the two jobs is the value of their functions on the one hand and their ability and speed to influence their society on the other. In this way we are able to isolate value from power of their professions merely by acknowledged that value should not be treated in this situation as a holistic and ambiguous measurement tool, but rather value is the importance of a given career to the survival (or rather reproduction and continuation) of that society (and its identity).
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