Does a Person’s Value Depend on What He or She Is Able to Produce?

This canonical unit asks a difficult ethical question about human worth: is a person valuable because of productivity, function or enjoyment, or does human dignity precede all of those measures? The source includes illness, disability, suffering, industrial imagery and a Holocaust comparison, and its review gate is explicitly high. It must not be used as individualized medical, suicide or end-of-life guidance, and its historical and halakhic claims require expert verification. The publication layer therefore preserves only the central philosophical claim: reducing a human being to output is a dangerous mistake. A person’s dignity does not disappear when strength, independence or productivity decline. Human value is intrinsic before it is useful.