Human Life
People often say that life is sacred. They almost never mean what they say. They do not mean, as their words seem to imply, that life itself is sacred. If they did, killing a pig or pulling up a cabbage would be as abhorrent to them as the murder of a human being. When people say that life is sacred, it is human life they have in mind. But why should human life have special value?
In discussing the doctrine of the sanctity of human life I shall not take the term “sanctity” in a specifically religious sense. The doctrine may well have a religious origin, as I shall suggest later in this chapter, but it is now part of a broadly secular ethic, and it is as part of this secular ethic that it is most influential today. Nor shall I take the doctrine as maintaining that it is always wrong to take human life, for this would imply absolute pacifism, and there are many supporters of the sanctity of human life who concede that we may kill in self-defense. We may take the doctrine of the sanctity of human life to be no more than a way of saying that human life has some special value, a value quite distinct from the value of the lives of other living things.
The view that human life has unique value is deeply rooted in our society and is enshrined in our law. To see how far it can be taken, I recommend a remarkable book: The Long Dying of Baby Andrew, by Robert and Peggy Stinson. In December 1976 Peggy Stinson, a Pennsylvania schoolteacher, was twenty-four weeks pregnant when she went into premature labor. The baby, whom Robert and Peggy named Andrew, was marginally viable. Despite a firm statement from both parents that they wanted “no heroics,” the doctors in charge of their child used all the technology of modern medicine to keep him alive for nearly six months.1 Andrew had periodic fits. Toward the end of that period, it was clear that if he survived at all, he would be seriously and permanently impaired. Andrew was also suffering considerably: at one point his doctor told the Stinsons that it must “hurt like hell” every time Andrew drew a breath. Andrew’s treatment cost $104,000, at 1977 cost levels—today it could easily be three times that, for intensive care for extremely premature babies costs at least $1,500 per day.
Andrew Stinson was kept alive, against the wishes of his parents, at a substantial financial cost, notwithstanding evident suffering, and despite the fact that, after a certain point it was clear that he would never be able to live an independent life, or to think and talk in the way that most humans do. Whether such treatment of an infant human being is or is not the right thing to do, it makes a striking contrast with the casual way in which we take the lives of stray dogs, experimental monkeys, and beef cattle. What justifies the difference?
In every society known to us there has been some prohibition on the taking of life. Presumably no society can survive if it allows its members to kill one another without restriction. Precisely who is protected, however, is a matter on which societies have differed. In many tribal societies the only serious offence is to kill an innocent member of the tribe itself—members of other tribes may be killed with impunity. In more sophisticated nation-states protection has generally extended to all within the nation’s territorial boundaries, although there have been cases—like slave-owning states—in which a minority was excluded. Nowadays most societies agree, in theory if not in practice, that, apart from special cases like self-defense, war, possibly capital punishment, and one or two other doubtful areas, it is wrong to kill human beings irrespective of their race, religion, class, or nationality. The moral inadequacy of narrower principles, limiting the respect for life to a tribe, race, or nation, is taken for granted; but the argument against speciesism must raise doubts about whether the boundary of our species marks a more defensible limit to the protected circle.2
At this point we should pause to ask what we mean by terms like “human life” or “human being.” These terms figure prominently in debates about, for example, abortion. “Is the fetus a human being?” is often taken as the crucial question in the abortion debate; but unless we think carefully about these terms such questions cannot be answered.
It is possible to give “human being” a precise meaning. We can use it as equivalent to “member of the species Homo sapiens.” Whether a being is a member of a given species is something that can be determined scientifically, by an examination of the nature of the chromosomes in the cells of living organisms. In this sense there is no doubt that from the first moments of its existence an embryo conceived from human sperm and eggs is a human being; and the same is true of the most profoundly and irreparably intellectually disabled human being, even of an infant who is born anencephalic—literally, without a brain.
There is another use of the term “human,” one proposed by Joseph Fletcher, a Protestant theologian and a prolific writer on ethical issues.3 Fletcher has compiled a list of what he calls “indicators of humanhood” that includes the following: self-awareness, self-control, a sense of the future, a sense of the past, the capacity to relate to others, concern for others, communication, and curiosity. This is the sense of the term that we have in mind when we praise someone by saying that she is “a real human being” or shows “truly human qualities.” In saying this we are not, of course, referring to the person’s membership in the species Homo sapiens, which as a matter of biological fact is rarely in doubt; we are implying that human beings characteristically possess certain qualities, and this person possesses them to a high degree.
These two senses of “human being” overlap but do not coincide. The embryo, the later fetus, the profoundly intellectually disabled child, even the newborn infant—all are indisputably members of the species Homo sapiens, but none are self-aware, have a sense of the future, or have the capacity to relate to others. Hence the choice between the two senses can make an important difference to how we answer questions like “Is the fetus a human being?”
When choosing which words to use in a situation like this, we should choose terms that will enable us to express our meaning clearly and that do not prejudge the answer to substantive questions. To stipulate that we shall use “human” in, say, the first of the two senses just described, and that therefore the fetus is a human being and abortion is immoral, would not do. Nor would it be any better to choose the second sense and argue on this basis that abortion is acceptable. The morality of abortion is a substantive issue, the answer to which cannot depend on a stipulation about how we shall use words. In order to avoid begging any questions, and to make my meaning clear, I shall for the moment put aside the tricky term “human” and substitute two different terms, corresponding to the two different senses of “human.” For the first sense, the biological sense, I shall simply use the cumbersome but precise expression “member of the species Homo sapiens” while for the second sense I shall use the term “person.”
This use of “person” is itself, unfortunately, liable to mislead, since “person” is often used as if it meant the same as “human being.” Yet the terms are not equivalent; there could be a person who is not a member of our species. There could also be members of our species who are not persons. The word “person” has its origin in the Latin term for a mask worn by an actor in classical drama. By putting on masks the actors signified that they were acting a role. Subsequently “person” came to mean one who plays a role in life, one who is an agent. According to the Oxford Dictionary, one of the current meanings of the term is “a self-conscious or rational being.” This sense has impeccable philosophical precedents. John Locke defines a person as “A thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places.”4
This definition makes “person” close to what Fletcher meant by “human,” except that it selects two crucial characteristics—rationality and self-consciousness—as the core of the concept. Quite possibly Fletcher would agree that these two are central, and the others more or less follow from them. In any case, I propose to use “person,” in the sense of a rational and self-conscious being, to capture those elements of the popular sense of “human being” that are not covered by “member of the species Homo sapiens.”
The Value of the Life of Members of the Species Homo Sapiens
With the clarification gained by our terminological interlude, and the argument against speciesism to draw upon, this section can be very brief. The wrongness of inflicting pain on a being cannot depend on the being’s species, nor can the wrongness of killing it. The biological facts upon which the boundary of our species is drawn do not have moral significance. To give preference to the life of a being simply because that being is a member of our species would put us in the same position as racists who give preference to those who are members of their race.
To those who have read the preceding chapters of this book, this conclusion may seem obvious, for we have worked toward it gradually; but it differs strikingly from the prevailing attitude in our society, which as we have seen treats as sacred the lives of all members of our species. How is it that our society should have come to accept a view that bears up so poorly under critical scrutiny? A short historical digression may help to explain.
If we go back to the origins of Western civilization, to Greek or Roman times, we find that membership in Homo sapiens was not sufficient to guarantee that one’s life would be protected. There was no respect for the lives of slaves or other “barbarians”; and even among the Greeks and Romans themselves, infants had no automatic right to life. Greeks and Romans killed deformed or weak infants by exposing them to the elements on a hilltop. Plato and Aristotle thought that the state should enforce the killing of deformed infants.5 The celebrated legislative codes said to have been drawn up by Lycurgus and Solon contained similar provisions. In this period it was thought better to end a life that had begun inauspiciously than to attempt to prolong that life, with all the problems it might bring.
Our present attitudes date from the coming of Christianity.6 There was a specific theological motivation for the Christian insistence on the importance of species membership: the belief that all born of human parents are immortal and destined for an eternity of bliss or for everlasting torment. With this belief, the killing of Homo sapiens took on a fearful significance, since it consigned a being to his or her eternal fate. A second Christian doctrine that led to the same conclusion was the belief that since we are created by God, we are his property, and to kill a human being is to usurp God’s right to decide when we shall live and when we shall die. As Thomas Aquinas put it, taking a human life is a sin against God in the same way that killing a slave would be a sin against the master to whom the slave belonged.7 Nonhuman animals, on the other hand, were believed to have been placed by God under man’s dominion, as recorded in the Bible (Genesis 1:29 and 9:1–3). Hence humans could kill nonhuman animals as they pleased, as long as the animals were not the property of another.
During the centuries of Christian domination of European thought the ethical attitudes based on these doctrines became part of the unquestioned moral orthodoxy of European civilization. Today the doctrines are no longer generally accepted, but the ethical attitudes to which they gave rise fit in with the deep-seated Western belief in the uniqueness and special privileges of our species, and have survived. Now that we are reassessing our speciesist view of nature, however, it is also time to reassess our belief in the sanctity of the lives of members of our species.
The Value of a Person’s Life
We have broken down the doctrine of the sanctity of human life into two separate claims, one that there is special value in the life of a member of our species, and the other that there is special value in the life of a person. We have seen that the former claim cannot be defended. What of the latter? Is there special value in the life of a rational and self-conscious being, as distinct from a being that is merely sentient?
One line of argument for answering this question affirmatively runs as follows. A self-conscious being is aware of itself as a distinct entity, with a past and a future. (This, remember, was Locke’s criterion for being a person.) A being aware of itself in this way will be capable of having desires about its own future. For example, a professor of philosophy may hope to write a book demonstrating the objective nature of ethics; a student may look forward to graduating; a child may want to go for a ride in an airplane. To take the lives of any of these people, without their consent, is to thwart their desires for the future. Killing a snail or a day-old infant does not thwart any desires of this kind, because snails and newborn infants are incapable of having such desires.
It may be said that when a person is killed we are not left with a thwarted desire in the same sense in which I have a thwarted desire when I am hiking through dry country and, pausing to ease my thirst, discover a hole in my water bottle. In this case I have a desire that I cannot fulfil, and I feel frustration and discomfort because of the continuing and unsatisfied desire for water. When I am killed the desires I have for the future do not continue after my death, and I do not suffer from their nonfulfilment. But does this mean that preventing the fulfilment of these desires does not matter?
Classical utilitarianism, as expounded by the founding father of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, and refined by later philosophers like John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick, judges actions by their tendency to maximise pleasure or happiness and minimize pain or unhappiness. Terms like “pleasure” and “happiness” lack precision, but it is clear that they refer to something that is experienced or felt—in other words, to states of consciousness. According to classical utilitarianism, therefore, there is no direct significance in the fact that desires for the future go unfulfilled when people die. If you die instantaneously, whether you have any desires for the future makes no difference to the amount of pleasure or pain you experience. Thus for the classical utilitarian the status of “person” is not directly relevant to the wrongness of killing.
Indirectly, however, being a person may be important for the classical utilitarian. Its importance arises in the following manner. If I am a person, I have a conception of myself. I know that I have a future. I also know that my future existence could be cut short. If I think that this is likely to happen at any moment, my present existence will be fraught with anxiety and will presumably be less enjoyable than if I do not think it is likely to happen for some time. If I learn that people like myself are very rarely killed, I will worry less. Hence the classical utilitarian can defend a prohibition on killing persons on the indirect ground that it will increase the happiness of people who would otherwise worry that they might be killed. I call this an indirect ground because it refers not to any direct wrong done to the person killed but rather to a consequence of it for other people. There is, of course, something odd about objecting to murder, not because of the wrong done to the victim, but because of the effect that the murder will have on others. One has to be a tough-minded classical utilitarian to be untroubled by this oddness. (Remember, though, that we are now considering only what is especially wrong about killing a person. The classical utilitarian can still regard killing as wrong because it eliminates the happiness that the victim would have experienced had she lived. This objection to murder will apply to any being likely to have a happy future, irrespective of whether the being is a person.) For present purposes, however, the main point is that this indirect ground does provide a reason for taking the killing of a person, under certain conditions, more seriously than the killing of a nonpersonal being. If a being is incapable of conceiving of itself as existing over time, we need not take into account the possibility of its worrying about the prospect of its future existence being cut short. It can’t worry about this, for it has no conception of its own future.
I said that the indirect classical utilitarian reason for taking the killing of a person more seriously than the killing of a nonperson holds “under certain conditions.” The most obvious of these conditions is that the killing of the person may become known to other persons, who derive from this knowledge a more gloomy estimate of their own chances of living to a ripe old age or simply become fearful of being murdered. It is of course possible that a person could be killed in complete secrecy, so that no one else knew a murder had been committed. Then this indirect reason against killing would not apply.
To this last point, however, a qualification must be made. In the circumstances described in the preceding paragraph, the indirect classical utilitarian reason against killing would not apply in so far as we judge this individual case. There is something to be said, however, against applying utilitarianism only or primarily at the level of each individual case. It may be that in the long run, we will achieve better results—greater overall happiness—if we urge people not to judge each individual action by the standard of utility, but instead to think along the lines of some broad principles that will cover all or virtually all of the situations that they are likely to encounter.
Several reasons have been offered in support of this approach. R. M. Hare has suggested a useful distinction between two levels of moral reasoning: the intuitive and the critical.8 To consider, in theory, the possible circumstances in which one might maximise utility by secretly killing someone who wants to go on living is to reason at the critical level. It can be interesting and helpful to our understanding of ethical theory to think about such unusual hypothetical cases, as philosophers or just as reflective, self-critical people. Everyday moral thinking, however, must be more intuitive. In real life we usually cannot foresee all the complexities of our choices. It is simply not practical to try to calculate the consequences, in advance, of every choice we make. Even if we were to limit ourselves to the more significant choices, there would be a danger that in many cases we would be calculating in less than ideal circumstances. We could be hurried or flustered. We might be feeling angry, or hurt, or competitive. Our thoughts could be colored by greed, or sexual desire, or thoughts of vengeance. Our own interests, or the interests of those we love, might be at stake. Or we might just not be very good at thinking about such complicated issues as the likely consequences of a significant choice. For all these reasons, Hare suggests, it will be better if, for our everyday ethical life, we adopt some broad ethical principles and do not deviate from them. These principles should include those that experience has shown, over the centuries, to be generally conducive to producing the best consequences: and in Hare’s view that would include many of the standard moral principles, for example, telling the truth, keeping promises, not harming others, and so on. Respecting the lives of people who want to go on living would presumably be among these principles. Even though, at the critical level, we can conceive of circumstances in which better consequences would flow from acting against one or more of these principles, people will do better on the whole if they stick to the principles than if they do not.
On this view, soundly chosen intuitive moral principles should be like a good tennis coach’s instructions to a player. The instructions are given with an eye to what will pay off most of the time; they are a guide to playing “percentage tennis.” Occasionally an individual player might go for a freak shot and pull off a winner that has everyone applauding; but if the coach is any good at all, deviations from the instructions laid down will, more often than not, lose. So it is better to put the thought of going for those freak shots out of one’s mind. Similarly, if we are guided by a set of well-chosen intuitive principles, we may do better if we do not attempt to calculate the consequences of each significant moral choice we must make, but instead consider what principles apply to it, and act accordingly. Perhaps very occasionally we will find ourselves in circumstances in which it is absolutely plain that departing from the principles will produce a much better result than we will obtain by sticking to them, and then we may be justified in making the departure. But for most of us, most of the time, such circumstances will not arise and can be excluded from our thinking. Therefore even though at the critical level the classical utilitarian must concede the possibility of cases in which it would be better not to respect a person’s desire to continue living, because the person could be killed in complete secrecy and a great deal of unalleviated misery could thereby be prevented, this kind of thinking has no place at the intuitive level that should guide our everyday actions. So, at least, a classical utilitarian can argue.
That is, I think, the gist of what the classical utilitarian would say about the distinction between killing a person and killing some other type of being. There is, however, another version of utilitarianism that gives greater weight to the distinction. This other version of utilitarianism judges actions, not by their tendency to maximize pleasure or minimize pain, but by the extent to which they accord with the preferences of any beings affected by the action or its consequences. This version of utilitarianism is known as “preference utilitarianism.” It is preference utilitarianism, rather than classical utilitarianism, that we reach by universalizing our own interests in the manner described in the opening chapter of this book—if, that is, we make the plausible move of taking a person’s interests to be what, on balance and after reflection on all the relevant facts, a person prefers.
According to preference utilitarianism, an action contrary to the preference of any being is, unless this preference is outweighed by contrary preferences, wrong. Killing a person who prefers to continue living is therefore wrong, other things being equal. That the victims are not around after the act to lament the fact that their preferences have been disregarded is irrelevant. The wrong is done when the preference is thwarted.
For preference utilitarians, taking the life of a person will normally be worse than taking the life of some other being, since persons are highly future-oriented in their preferences. To kill a person is therefore, normally, to violate not just one preference but a wide range of the most central and significant preferences a being can have. Very often, it will make nonsense of everything that the victim has been trying to do in the past days, months, or even years. In contrast, beings who cannot see themselves as entities with a future cannot have any preferences about their own future existence. This is not to deny that such beings might struggle against a situation in which their lives are in danger, as a fish struggles to get free of the barbed hook in its mouth; but this indicates no more than a preference for the cessation of a state of affairs that is perceived as painful or frightening. A struggle against danger and pain does not suggest that fish are capable of preferring their own future existence to nonexistence. The behavior of a fish on a hook suggests a reason for not killing fish by that method, but does not in itself suggest a preference utilitarian reason against killing fish by a method that brings about death instantly, without first causing pain or distress. (Again, remember that we are here considering what is especially wrong about killing a person; I am not saying that there are never any preference utilitarian reasons against killing conscious beings who are not persons.)
Does a Person Have a Right to Life?
Although preference utilitarianism does provide a direct reason for not killing a person, some may find the reason—even when coupled with the important indirect reasons that any form of utilitarianism will take into account—not sufficiently stringent. Even for preference utilitarianism, the wrong done to the person killed is merely one factor to be taken into account, and the preference of the victim could sometimes be outweighed by the preferences of others. Some say that the prohibition on killing people is more absolute than this kind of utilitarian calculation implies. Our life, we feel, is something to which we have a right, and rights are not to be traded off against the preferences or pleasures of others.
I am not convinced that the notion of a moral right is a helpful or meaningful one, except when it is used as a shorthand way of referring to more fundamental moral considerations. Nevertheless, since the idea that we have a “right to life” is a popular one, it is worth asking whether there are grounds for attributing rights to life to persons, as distinct from other living beings.
Michael Tooley, a contemporary American philosopher, has argued that the only beings who have a right to life are those who can conceive of themselves as distinct entities existing over time—in other words, persons, as we have used the term. His argument is based on the claim that there is a conceptual connection between the desires a being is capable of having and the rights that the being can be said to have. As Tooley puts it:
The basic intuition is that a right is something that can be violated and that, in general, to violate an individual’s right to something is to frustrate the corresponding desire. Suppose, for example, that you own a car. Then I am under a prima facie obligation not to take it from you. However, the obligation is not unconditional: it depends in part upon the existence of a corresponding desire in you. If you do not care whether I take your car, then I generally do not violate your right by doing so.9
Tooley admits that it is difficult to formulate the connections between rights and desires precisely, because there are problem cases like people who are asleep or temporarily unconscious. He does not want to say that such people have no rights because they have, at that moment, no desires. Nevertheless, Tooley holds, the possession of a right must in some way be linked with the capacity to have the relevant desires, if not with having the actual desires themselves.
The next step is to apply this view about rights to the case of the right to life. To put the matter as simply as possible—more simply than Tooley himself does and no doubt too simply—if the right to life is the right to continue existing as a distinct entity, then the desire relevant to possessing a right to life is the desire to continue existing as a distinct entity. But only a being who is capable of conceiving of herself as a distinct entity existing over time—that is, only a person—could have this desire. Therefore only a person could have a right to life.
This is how Tooley first formulated his position, in a striking article entitled “Abortion and Infanticide,” first published in 1972. The problem of how precisely to formulate the connections between rights and desires, however, led Tooley to alter his position in a subsequent book with the same title, Abortion and Infanticide. He there argues that an individual cannot at a given time—say, now—have a right to continued existence unless the individual is of a kind such that it can now be in its interests that it continue to exist. One might think that this makes a dramatic difference to the outcome of Tooley’s position, for while a newborn infant would not seem to be capable of conceiving of itself as a distinct entity existing over time, we commonly think that it can be in the interests of an infant to be saved from death, even if the death would have been entirely without pain or suffering. We certainly do this in retrospect: I might say, if I know that I nearly died in infancy, that the person who snatched my pram from the path of the speeding train is my greatest benefactor, for without her swift thinking I would never have had the happy and fulfilling life that I am now living. Tooley argues, however, that the retrospective attribution of an interest in living to the infant is a mistake. I am not the infant from whom I developed. The infant could not look forward to developing into the kind of being I am, or even into any intermediate being, between the being I now am and the infant. I cannot even recall being the infant; there are no mental links between us. Continued existence cannot be in the interests of a being who never has had the concept of a continuing self—that is, never has been able to conceive of itself as existing over time. If the train had instantly killed the infant, the death would not have been contrary to the interests of the infant, because the infant would never have had the concept of existing over time. It is true that I would then not be alive, but I can say that it is in my interests to be alive only because I do have the concept of a continuing self. I can with equal truth say that it is in my interests that my parents met, because if they had never met, they could not have created the embryo from which I developed, and so I would not be alive. This does not mean that the creation of this embryo was in the interests of any potential being who was lurking around, waiting to be brought into existence. There was no such being, and had I not been brought into existence, there would not have been anyone who missed out on the life I have enjoyed living. Similarly, we make a mistake if we now construct an interest in future life in the infant, who in the first days following birth can have no concept of continued existence, and with whom I have no mental links.
Hence in his book Tooley reaches, though by a more circuitous route, a conclusion that is practically equivalent to the conclusion he reached in his article. To have a right to life, one must have, or at least at one time have had, the concept of having a continued existence. Note that this formulation avoids any problems in dealing with sleeping or unconscious people; it is enough that they have had, at one time, the concept of continued existence for us to be able to say that continued life may be in their interests. This makes sense: my desire to continue living—or to complete the book I am writing, or to travel around the world next year—does not cease whenever I am not consciously thinking about these things. We often desire things without having the desire at the forefront of our minds. The fact that we have the desire is apparent if we are reminded of it, or suddenly confronted with a situation in which we must choose between two courses of action, one of which makes the fulfilment of the desire less likely. In a similar way, when we go to sleep our desires for the future have not ceased to exist. They will still be there when we wake. As the desires are still part of us, so, too, our interest in continued life remains part of us while we are asleep or unconscious.
People and Respect for Autonomy
To this point our discussion of the wrongness of killing people has focused on their capacity to envisage their future and have desires related to it. Another implication of being a person may also be relevant to the wrongness of killing. There is a strand of ethical thought, associated with Kant but including many modern writers who are not Kantians, according to which respect for autonomy is a basic moral principle. By “autonomy” is meant the capacity to choose, to make and act on one’s own decisions. Rational and self-conscious beings presumably have this ability, whereas beings who cannot consider the alternatives open to them are not capable of choosing in the required sense and hence cannot be autonomous. In particular, only a being who can grasp the difference between dying and continuing to live can autonomously choose to live. Hence killing a person who does not choose to die fails to respect that person’s autonomy; and as the choice of living or dying is about the most fundamental choice anyone can make, the choice on which all other choices depend, killing a person who does not choose to die is the gravest possible violation of that person’s autonomy.
Not everyone agrees that respect for autonomy is a basic moral principle, or a valid moral principle at all. Utilitarians do not respect autonomy for its own sake, although they might give great weight to a person’s desire to go on living, either in a preference utilitarian way or as evidence that the person’s life was on the whole a happy one. But if we are preference utilitarians we must allow that a desire to go on living can be outweighed by other desires, and if we are classical utilitarians we must recognize that people may be utterly mistaken in their expectations of happiness. So a utilitarian, in objecting to the killing of a person, cannot place the same stress on autonomy as those who take respect for autonomy as an independent moral principle. The classical utilitarian might have to accept that in some cases it would be right to kill a person who does not choose to die on the grounds that the person will otherwise lead a miserable life. This is true, however, only on the critical level of moral reasoning. As we saw earlier, utilitarians may encourage people to adopt, in their daily lives, principles that will in almost all cases lead to better consequences when followed than any alternative action. The principle of respect for autonomy would be a prime example of such a principle.10
It may be helpful here to draw together our conclusions about the value of a person’s life. We have seen that there are four possible reasons for holding that a person’s life has some distinctive value over and above the life of a merely sentient being: the classical utilitarian concern with the effects of the killing on others; the preference utilitarian concern with the frustration of the victim’s desires and plans for the future; the argument that the capacity to conceive of oneself as existing over time is a necessary condition of a right to life; and respect for autonomy. Although at the level of critical reasoning a classical utilitarian would accept only the first, indirect, reason, and a preference utilitarian only the first two reasons, at the intuitive level utilitarians of both kinds would probably advocate respect for autonomy too. The distinction between critical and intuitive levels thus leads to a greater degree of convergence, at the level of everyday moral decision making, between utilitarians and those who hold other moral views than we would find if we took into account only the critical level of reasoning. In any case, none of the four reasons for giving special protection to the lives of persons can be rejected out of hand. We shall therefore bear all four in mind when we turn to practical issues involving killing.
Before we do turn to practical questions about killing, however, we have still to consider claims about the value of life that are based neither on membership in our species nor on being a person.
There are many beings who are sentient and capable of experiencing pleasure and pain but are not rational and self-conscious and so not persons. I shall refer to these as conscious beings. Many nonhuman animals almost certainly fall into this category; so must newborn infants and some intellectually disabled humans. Exactly which of these lack self-consciousness is something we shall consider in the next chapters. If Tooley is right, those beings who do lack self-consciousness cannot be said to have a right to life, in the full sense of “right.” Still, for other reasons, it might be wrong to kill them. In the present section we shall ask if the life of a being who is conscious but not self-conscious has value, and if so, how the value of such a life compares with the value of a person’s life.
Should We Value Conscious Life?
The most obvious reason for valuing the life of a being capable of experiencing pleasure or pain is the pleasure it can experience. If we value our own pleasures—like the pleasures of eating, of sex, of running at full speed, and of swimming on a hot day—then the universal aspect of ethical judgments requires us to extend our positive evaluation of our own experience of these pleasures to the similar experiences of all who can experience them. But death is the end of all pleasurable experiences. Thus the fact that beings will experience pleasure in the future is a reason for saying that it would be wrong to kill them. Of course, a similar argument about pain points in the opposite direction, and it is only when we believe that the pleasure that beings are likely to experience outweighs the pain they are likely to suffer that this argument counts against killing. So what this amounts to is that we should not cut short a pleasant life.
This seems simple enough: we value pleasure; killing those who lead pleasant lives eliminates the pleasure they would otherwise experience; therefore such killing is wrong. But stating the argument in this way conceals something that, once noticed, makes the issue anything but simple. There are two ways of reducing the amount of pleasure in the world: one is to eliminate pleasures from the lives of those leading pleasant lives; the other is to eliminate those leading pleasant lives. The former leaves behind beings who experience less pleasure than they otherwise would have. The latter does not. This means that we cannot move automatically from a preference for a pleasant life rather than an unpleasant one to a preference for a pleasant life rather than no life at all. For, it might be objected, being killed does not make us worse off; it makes us cease to exist. Once we have ceased to exist, we shall not miss the pleasure we would have experienced.
Perhaps this seems sophistical—an instance of the ability of academic philosophers to find distinctions where there are no significant differences. If that is what you think, consider the opposite case: a case not of reducing pleasure but of increasing it. There are two ways of increasing the amount of pleasure in the world: one is to increase the pleasure of those who now exist; the other is to increase the number of those who will lead pleasant lives. If killing those leading pleasant lives is bad because of the loss of pleasure, then it would seem to be good to increase the number of those leading pleasant lives. We could do this by having more children, provided we could reasonably expect their lives to be pleasant, or by rearing large numbers of animals under conditions that would ensure that their lives would be pleasant. But would it really be good to create more pleasure by creating more pleased beings?
There seem to be two possible approaches to these perplexing issues. The first approach is simply to accept that it is good to increase the amount of pleasure in the world by increasing the number of pleasant lives, and bad to reduce the amount of pleasure in the world by reducing the number of pleasant lives. This approach has the advantage of being straightforward and clearly consistent, but it requires us to hold that if we could increase the number of beings leading pleasant lives without making others worse off, it would be good to do so. To see whether you are troubled by this conclusion, it may be helpful to consider a specific case. Imagine that a couple are trying to decide whether to have children. Suppose that as far as their own happiness is concerned, the advantages and disadvantages balance out. Children will interfere with their careers at a crucial stage of their professional lives and they will have to give up their favorite recreation, cross-country skiing, for a few years at least. At the same time, they know that, like most parents, they will get joy and fulfillment from having children and watching them develop. Suppose that if others will be affected, the good and bad effects will cancel each other out. Finally, suppose that since the couple could provide their children with a good start in life, and the children would be citizens of a developed nation with a high living standard, it is probable that their children will lead pleasant lives. Should the couple count the likely future pleasure of their children as a significant reason for having children? I doubt that many couples would, but if we accept this first approach, they should.
I shall call this approach the “total” view, since on this view we aim to increase the total amount of pleasure (and reduce the total amount of pain) and are indifferent whether this is done by increasing the pleasure of existing beings or increasing the number of beings who exist.
The second approach is to count only beings who already exist, prior to the decision we are taking, or at least will exist independently of that decision. We can call this the “prior existence” view. It denies that there is value in increasing pleasure by creating additional beings. The prior existence view is more in harmony with the intuitive judgment most people have (I think) that couples are under no moral obligation to have children when the children are likely to lead pleasant lives and no one else is adversely affected. But how do we square the prior existence view with our intuitions about the reverse case, when a couple are considering having a child who, perhaps because it will inherit a genetic defect, would lead a thoroughly miserable life and die before its second birthday? We would think it wrong for a couple knowingly to conceive such a child; but if the pleasure a possible child will experience is not a reason for bringing it into the world, why is the pain a possible child will experience a reason against bringing it into the world? The prior existence view must either hold that there is nothing wrong with bringing a miserable being into the world, or explain the asymmetry between cases of possible children who are likely to have pleasant lives and possible children who are likely to have miserable lives. Denying that it is bad knowingly to bring a miserable child into the world is hardly likely to appeal to those who adopted the prior existence view in the first place because it seemed more in harmony with their intuitive judgments than the total view; but a convincing explanation of the asymmetry is not easy to find. Perhaps the best one can say—and it is not very good—is that there is nothing directly wrong in conceiving a child who will be miserable, but once such a child exists, since its life can contain nothing but misery, we should reduce the amount of pain in the world by an act of euthanasia. But euthanasia is a more harrowing process for the parents and others involved than nonconception. Hence we have an indirect reason for not conceiving a child bound to have a miserable existence.
So is it wrong to cut short a pleasant life? We can hold that it is, on either the total view or the prior existence view, but our answers commit us to different things in each case. We can take the prior existence approach only if we accept that it is not wrong to bring a miserable being into existence—or else offer an explanation for why this should be wrong, and yet it not be wrong to fail to bring into existence a being whose life will be pleasant. Alternatively we can take the total approach, but then we must accept that it is also good to create more beings whose lives will be pleasant—and this has some odd practical implications.11
Comparing the Value of Different Lives
If we can give an affirmative—albeit somewhat shaky—answer to the question whether the life of a being who is conscious but not self-conscious has some value, can we also compare the value of different lives, at different levels of consciousness or self-consciousness? We are not, of course, going to attempt to assign numerical values to the lives of different beings, or even to produce an ordered list. The best that we could hope for is some idea of the principles that, when supplemented with the appropriate detailed information about the lives of different beings, might serve as the basis for such a list. But the most fundamental issue is whether we can accept the idea of ordering the value of different lives at all.
Some say that it is anthropocentric, even speciesist, to order the value of different lives in a hierarchical manner. If we do so we shall, inevitably, be placing ourselves at the top and other beings closer to us in proportion to the resemblance between them and ourselves. Instead we should recognize that from the points of view of the different beings themselves, each life is of equal value. Those who take this view recognize, of course, that a person’s life may include the study of philosophy while a mouse’s life cannot; but they say that the pleasures of a mouse’s life are all that the mouse has, and so can be presumed to mean as much to the mouse as the pleasures of a person’s life mean to the person. We cannot say that the one is more or less valuable than the other.
Is it speciesist to judge that the life of a normal adult member of our species is more valuable than the life of a normal adult mouse? It would be possible to defend such a judgment only if we can find some neutral ground, some impartial standpoint from which we can make the comparison.
The difficulty of finding neutral ground is a very real practical difficulty, but I am not convinced that it presents an insoluble theoretical problem. I would frame the question we need to ask in the following manner. Imagine that I have the peculiar property of being able to turn myself into an animal, so that like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “Sometimes a horse I’ll be, sometimes a hound.” And suppose that when I am a horse, I really am a horse, with all and only the mental experiences of a horse, and when I am a human being I have all and only the mental experiences of a human being. Now let us make the additional supposition that I can enter a third state in which I remember exactly what it was like to be a horse and exactly what it was like to be a human being. What would this third state be like? In some respects—the degree of self-awareness and rationality involved, for instance—it might be more like a human existence than an equine one, but it would not be a human existence in every respect. In this third state, then, I could compare horse-existence with human-existence. Suppose that I were offered the opportunity of another life, and given the choice of life as a horse or as a human being, the lives in question being in each case about as good as horse or human lives can reasonably be expected to be on this planet. I would then be deciding, in effect, between the value of the life of a horse (to the horse) and the value of the life of a human (to the human).
Undoubtedly this scenario requires us to suppose a lot of things that could never happen, and some things that strain our imagination. The coherence of an existence in which one is neither a horse nor a human, but remembers what it was like to be both, might be questioned. Nevertheless I think I can make some sense of the idea of choosing from this position; and I am fairly confident that from this position, some forms of life would be seen as preferable to others.
If it is true that we can make sense of the choice between existence as a mouse and existence as a human, then—whichever way the choice would go—we can make sense of the idea that the life of one kind of animal possesses greater value than the life of another; and if this is so, then the claim that the life of every being has equal value is on very weak ground. We cannot defend this claim by saying that every being’s life is all-important for it, since we have now accepted a comparison that takes a more objective—or at least intersubjective—stance and thus goes beyond the value of the life of a being considered solely from the point of view of that being.
So it would not necessarily be speciesist to rank the value of different lives in some hierarchical ordering. How we should go about doing this is another question, and I have nothing better to offer than the imaginative reconstruction of what it would be like to be a different kind of being. Some comparisons may be too difficult. We may have to say that we have not the slightest idea whether it would be better to be a fish or a snake; but then, we do not very often find ourselves forced to choose between killing a fish or a snake. Other comparisons might not be so difficult. In general it does seem that the more highly developed the conscious life of the being, the greater the degree of self-awareness and rationality and the broader the range of possible experiences, the more one would prefer that kind of life, if one were choosing between it and a being at a lower level of awareness. Can utilitarians defend such a preference? In a famous passage John Stuart Mill attempted to do so:
Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast’s pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs.… It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.12
As many critics have pointed out, this argument is weak. Does Socrates really know what it is like to be a fool? Can he truly experience the joys of idle pleasure in simple things, untroubled by the desire to understand and improve the world? We may doubt it. But another significant aspect of this passage is less often noticed. Mill’s argument for preferring the life of a human being to that of an animal (with which most modern readers would be quite comfortable) is exactly paralleled by his argument for preferring the life of an intelligent human being to that of fool. Given the context and the way in which the term “fool” was commonly used in his day, it seems likely that by this he means what we would now refer to as a person with an intellectual disability. With this further conclusion some modern readers will be distinctly uncomfortable; but as Mill’s argument suggests, it is not easy to embrace the preference for the life of a human over that of a nonhuman, without at the same time endorsing a preference for the life of a normal human being over that of another human at an intellectual level similar to that of the nonhuman in the first comparison.
Mill’s argument is difficult to reconcile with classical utilitarianism, because it just does not seem true that the more intelligent being necessarily has a greater capacity for happiness; and even if we were to accept that the capacity is greater, the fact that, as Mill acknowledges, this capacity is less often filled (the fool is satisfied, Socrates is not) would have to be taken into consideration. Would a preference utilitarian have a better prospect of defending the judgments Mill makes? That would depend on how we compare different preferences, held with differing degrees of awareness and self-consciousness. It does not seem impossible that we should find ways of ranking such different preferences, but at this stage the question remains open.