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 all life 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, 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-defence and some who support capital punishment. We may take the doctrine of the
sanctity of human life as simply a way of saying that human life has some very 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, consider what happened to Peggy Stinson, a Pennsylvania schoolteacher, who was twenty-four
weeks pregnant when she went into premature labor. The baby, whom Peggy and her husband 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. Andrew had periodic fits. Towards 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, and these events took place in 1977 – today the cost of keeping an infant in intensive care for six months
could easily exceed a million dollars.
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 it is right to treat an infant human being like this is
a question we shall examine in Chapter 7. Here, I want to note the striking contrast between such efforts to preserve a human
life and the casual way in which we take the lives of stray dogs, monkeys used in experiments, and the cattle, pigs and chickens
we eat. What could justify 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 notorious cases in which a minority was
excluded.
Nowadays most agree, in theory if not in practice, that, apart from special cases like self-defence, 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 respect for life to a tribe, race or nation, is taken
for granted; but the argument of the preceding chapter must raise doubts about whether the boundary of our species marks a
defensible limit to the protected circle.
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 abortion and experimentation on embryos. ‘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 anencephalic infant – that is, an infant that, as a result of a defect in the formation of the neural tube, has
no brain.
There is another use of the term ‘human’, one proposed by Joseph Fletcher, a major figure in the development of bioethics.
Fletcher compiled a list of what he called ‘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 never 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 the capacity to relate to others. Hence, the choice between the
two senses can make an important difference to how we answer such questions as, ‘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 the fetus is not a human being so 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, 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’, and for the second sense, I shall use the term ‘person’.
This use of ‘person’ is itself, unfortunately, liable to mislead, because ‘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’.
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 have agreed 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-aware being, to capture those elements of the popular sense of ‘human being’ that are not covered by ‘member
of the species
Homo sapiens’. (I take ‘self-conscious’ and ‘self-aware’ to mean the same thing.)
Killing Members of the Species Homo sapiens
With the clarification gained by our terminological interlude, and the argument of the preceding chapter to draw on, this
section can be very brief. The wrongness of inflicting pain on a being cannot depend on the being's species, and nor can the wrongness of killing it.
The biological facts on which the boundary of our species is based 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 a position uncomfortably similar to that
of 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 towards it
gradually; but it differs strikingly from the prevailing attitude in our society, which as we have seen treats the lives of
all members of our species as uniquely valuable. 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 of 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. 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. 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, because it consigned a being to his or her eternal fate. A second Christian doctrine that led to the
same conclusion was the belief that because 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. 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,
so long as they 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 religious doctrines are no longer universally 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; these ethical attitudes 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.
Killing a Person
We have broken down the doctrine of the sanctity of human life into two separate claims, one that it is especially serious
to take the life of a member of our species, and the other that it is especially serious to take the life of a person. We
have seen that the former claim cannot be defended. What of the latter? Is there something about the life of a rational and
self-conscious being, as distinct from a being that is merely sentient, that makes it much more serious to take the life of
the former than the latter?
One line of argument for giving an affirmative answer to this question 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. A student may look forward to graduating;
a child may want to go to a birthday party; a professor of philosophy may hope to write a book critical of some widely accepted
ethical beliefs.
To take the lives of any of these people, without their consent, is to thwart their desires for the future. For most mature
humans, these forward-looking desires are absolutely central to our lives, so to kill a normal
human against his or her wishes is to thwart that person's most significant desires. Killing a snail does not thwart any desires
of this kind, because snails are incapable of having such desires. (In this respect, however, human fetuses and even newborn
infants are in the same situation as snails. We shall explore the implications of this in a subsequent chapter.)
Admittedly, 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 that my water bottle is empty. Then 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 the fact that
I cannot satisfy them. Does this mean that preventing the fulfilment of these desires does not matter?
Classical or hedonistic utilitarianism, as we have already noted, judges actions by their tendency to maximize 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 hedonistic 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 hedonistic utilitarian, the status of ‘person’ is not directly relevant to the wrongness of killing.
Indirectly, however, being a person may be important for the hedonistic utilitarian. Its importance arises in the following
manner. If I am a person, 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 I am likely to die for some time. If I know that people like myself are very rarely killed,
I will worry less than if the opposite is the case. Hence, the hedonistic 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 does not refer to any direct wrong done to the person killed, but rather to a consequence of the killing
for others. 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 hedonistic utilitarian to be untroubled by this oddness. Remember, though, that we are now only
considering what is
especially wrong about killing a
person. The hedonistic utilitarian can still regard killing as wrong because it eliminates the happiness that the victim would have
experienced had she lived. This direct 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 the indirect ground does provide a
reason why even the hedonistic utilitarian should take the killing of a person, under certain conditions, more seriously than
the killing of a being that is not a person. If a being is incapable of conceiving of itself as existing over time, we need
not take into account the possibility of it 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 hedonistic utilitarian reason for taking the killing of a person more seriously than the killing
of a being that is not a person holds ‘under certain conditions’. The most obvious of these conditions is that the killing
of the person may become known to other persons, who therefore become fearful of being murdered or gloomy about their prospects
of living to a ripe old age. 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 last paragraph, the indirect
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 – whether classical hedonistic utilitarianism or
preference 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.
To consider the possible circumstances in which one might maximize utility by secretly killing someone who wants to go on
living is to reason at the critical level. Those who are reflective, self-critical or philosophically inclined may find it
interesting and helpful to think about such unusual hypothetical cases. 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 doing these complex calculations in less than ideal circumstances. We could be hurried
or flustered. We might be feeling angry or hurt or competitive. Our thoughts could be coloured 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 we adopt some broad ethical principles for our everyday ethical
life 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.
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, the moral principles we choose to live by 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, a player whose strength is playing from the baseline will rush the net 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 for a baseline player to put the thought of going to the net out of her mind, except perhaps in carefully
defined circumstances. 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 decision we must make, but instead consider what principles
apply to our decisions 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. For most of us most of the time, however, such circumstances will
not arise and can be excluded from our thinking. Therefore, even though at the critical level the utilitarian must concede the possibility of cases in which it would be better
not to respect a person's desire to continue living – for example, 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 utilitarian can argue.
That is, I think, the gist of what the hedonistic utilitarian would say about the distinction between killing a person and
killing some other type of being. Preference utilitarianism – the version of utilitarianism that we reach by universalizing
our own preferences in the manner described in the opening chapter of this book – gives greater weight to the distinction.
According to preference utilitarianism, an action contrary to the preference of any being is wrong, unless this preference
is outweighed by contrary preferences. 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. (Think about your own preference to go on living. You don't want it to
be thwarted, and I doubt very much that you will be persuaded to change your mind about this by the fact that, if you are
killed instantly, you will never suffer from the fact that your desire to go on living has been thwarted.)
For preference utilitarians, taking the life of a person will normally be worse than taking the life of some other being,
because persons are highly future-oriented in their preferences. To kill a person is therefore, normally, to violate not just
one 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 that cannot see
themselves as entities with a future do not 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 causes
pain or fear.
The behaviour 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.
Struggles against danger and pain do not suggest that fish are capable of preferring their own future existence to non-existence.
(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
sentient beings that are not persons. We shall return to this question shortly.)
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. For preference utilitarianism, the wrong done to the person killed is serious, but not necessarily decisive. The
preference of the victim for continued life could sometimes be outweighed by the strong preferences of others. Many believe
that the prohibition on killing people is more absolute than any kind of utilitarian calculation can imply. Our lives, we
feel, are things 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, such as the view that – for the reasons offered in the preceding
section – for all normal circumstances we should we put the idea of killing people who want to go on living completely out
our minds. Nevertheless, because the idea that we have a right to life is a popular one, it is worth asking whether there
are grounds for attributing a right to life to a person, 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.
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 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”, 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 continues to exist.
One might think that this makes a dramatic difference to the outcome of Tooley's position, for although a newborn infant would
not seem to be capable of conceiving 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. If my mother told me that when I was a baby, my pram rolled into the path of a speeding train, and
it was only the quick action of a stranger that saved me, I might say that that stranger 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 newborn 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 continuing existence. Note that this formulation avoids any problems in dealing with sleeping or unconscious people; it is enough that they, at
one time, have had 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 to Nepal next year – does
not cease whenever I am not consciously thinking about these things. We often desire things without the desire being 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 do not cease 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.
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.
‘Autonomy’ here refers to the capacity to choose and to act on one's own decisions.
Rational and self-aware beings presumably have this capacity, 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 as we have seen, they might give great weight to a person's
desire to go on living, either directly as a preference utilitarian would or as evidence that the person's life was on the
whole a happy one, as a hedonistic utilitarian would. But a utilitarian cannot place the same stress on autonomy as those
who take respect for autonomy as an independent moral principle. The hedonistic 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, and the preference utilitarian may have to reach
a similar conclusion if a person's desire to go on living is outweighed by the equally strong desires of others. 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. We shall discuss actual
cases that raise this issue in the chapter on euthanasia.
It may be helpful here to draw together our conclusions about the wrongness of taking a person's life. We have seen that there
are four possible reasons for holding that it is especially serious to take a person's life: the hedonistic 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 hedonistic 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 the idea of a right to life as well
as respect for autonomy.
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 non-utilitarians 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 whether killing is wrong when the
being that is killed is neither a member of our species nor a person.
Many beings are sentient and capable of experiencing pleasure and pain, but they are not rational and self-conscious and,
therefore, are not persons. I shall refer to these as ‘merely conscious’ beings. Many nonhuman animals fall into this category;
so must newborn infants and some intellectually disabled humans. Exactly which of these lack self-awareness is something we
shall consider in the next chapters. If Tooley is right, beings that lack self-awareness cannot be said to have a right to
life, in the full sense, though it might be wrong to kill them for other reasons. In the present section, we shall ask if
it is wrong to take the life of a merely conscious being and, if so, why.
Killing a Merely Conscious Being
The most obvious reason for thinking that it is wrong to kill a being capable of experiencing pleasure or pain is the one
that a hedonistic utilitarian would give: because of the pleasure it can experience.
If we value our own pleasures – like the pleasures of eating, of sex, of the warmth of the sun on our skin, or 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 this argument counts against killing
only when we believe that the pleasure that beings are likely to experience outweighs the pain they are likely to suffer.
So what this amounts to is that we should not cut short a pleasant life.
This seems simple enough: we value pleasure, and killing those who lead pleasant lives eliminates the pleasure they would
otherwise experience, therefore such killing is wrong. Note that this claim goes beyond the simple argument for preference utilitarianism based on universalizing our own preferences
that I outlined in Chapter 1. The merely conscious being does not have a preference for continued life. Perhaps while having a pleasurable experience it has a preference for that experience to continue, or while having a painful
experience it has a preference for that experience to end, but it will not have any preferences for the long-term future,
and the desires it has do not survive periods of sleep or temporary unconsciousness, because unlike a self-aware being, it
has no conception of its own future existence after a period of sleep. Thus if we are concerned only about the thwarting of preferences, for a merely conscious being, painless killing and administering
an anesthetic seem to be equivalent. Killing does not thwart any more desires than putting the being to sleep. The being will
be able to continue to satisfy its preferences after it awakes, but from the being's subjective perspective it is as if a
new being, with new preferences, came into existence. Tooley's claim about newborn infants applies here to all merely conscious
beings: in the subject experience of the being itself, there is no sense of continuity between its mental life before it falls
asleep and after it wakes. That is why the claim, in the first sentence of this paragraph, that ‘we value pleasure’ needs
to be understood in terms that go beyond the preference utilitarian starting point for ethics. It asserts that pleasure is
a value – and thus, that there are things of value, independently of a being preferring them.
This particular value is easy to accept. Isn't it obvious that pleasure is of positive value and pain is of negative value?
Jeremy Bentham, the founder of the utilitarian school, even went so far as to say that the words ‘benefit, advantage, pleasure,
good, or happiness’ all come to the same thing, and ‘a thing is said to promote the interest, or to be
for the interest, of an individual, when it tends to add to the sum total of his pleasures: or, what comes to the same thing,
to diminish the sum total of his pains’. Some philosophers think Bentham was wrong about this: they think that something can
be in my interest if it is what I most want, whether or not
it will give me the most pleasure or the least pain. To defend Bentham's view, we would have to regard pleasure and pain as
objective values (in the case of pain, an objective negative value or disvalue), not based merely on the universalizing of
our preferences. To defend that claim, we would need to explain the nature of such objective values and how we come to know
of them. These would be philosophically controversial claims, but not necessarily indefensible ones.
Suppose, then, that we did accept the idea that pleasure is objectively good and pain is objectively bad, and that we agreed
with Bentham that to say that something promotes the interest of an individual is to say that it tends to add to the sum total
of his, or her, pleasures, after subtracting pains. We now face another difficult issue. Stating the argument in terms of
the interests of an individual conceals the fact that 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 valuing a pleasant life rather than an unpleasant one, to valuing 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.
You may think that this is sophistical – an instance of the ability of academic philosophers to find distinctions where there
are no significant differences. Why not, you may ask, regard killing a being as just the same as reducing the pleasures of
an existing being to zero? One reason for thinking that there might be a morally significant difference between the two ways
of reducing the amount of pleasure in the world is that we do think there is a morally significant difference between the
two parallel ways of increasing the amount of pleasure in the world, one of which is to increase the pleasure of those who
now exist, and 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. 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 so 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 favourite recreation, backcountry hiking, for
a few years at least. On the other hand, they know that, like most parents, they will get joy and fulfilment from having children
and watching them develop. Suppose that if others will be affected, here too the good and bad effects will cancel each other
out. Finally, suppose that because 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 enjoyable 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 because on this view we should aim to increase the total amount of pleasure (strictly,
the net total amount of pleasure after deducting the total amount of pain) and we should be indifferent to whether this is
done by increasing the pleasure of existing beings or increasing the number of beings who exist.
The second approach is to be concerned only about beings who exist and those who will exist independently of what we do –
as we noted in discussing the social contract view of ethics, it would be wrong to disregard the interests of future generations
merely because they do not exist now. We can call this the ‘prior existence’ view because it is concerned with beings who
exist, or whose existence is already determined, prior to the decision we are making. The prior existence view denies that
there is value in increasing pleasure by creating additional beings.
It is more in harmony with the intuitive judgment most people have (I think) that couples are under no moral obligation to
have children simply because
the children are likely to lead enjoyable 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 enjoyable 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, because its life can contain nothing but
misery, we should reduce the amount of pain in the world by an act of euthanasia. This is, at best, paradoxical, for it implies
that there is nothing wrong with conceiving a child even though one knows that, once the child exists, it will be morally
obligatory to kill it. In addition if, as in most societies today, euthanasia is a crime that renders one liable to a long
term of imprisonment, one might have overriding reasons for
not killing the miserable child once it exists. In that case, on this view, one has no reason against conceiving a child who
will have a miserable life even when there is an overriding reason not to end that life once the child exists. The parents
can foresee that the child they bring into existence is likely to exist in misery for several decades, and yet they will,
on the prior existence view, have done nothing wrong.
This leaves us with counterintuitive consequences for both the total and the prior existence view. Where has this taken us
with regard to our original question, whether it is wrong to cut short a pleasant life? On either the total view or the prior
existence view, we can hold that it is wrong, but our answers commit us to different things in each case. We can only take
the prior existence approach 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 would 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. The importance of the choice between the
two views will become more apparent in the chapters that follow.
Comparing the Value of Different Lives
If we can give an affirmative – albeit somewhat shaky – answer to the question whether the life of a merely conscious being
has some value, can we also compare the value of different lives at different levels of consciousness or self-awareness? 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. The most fundamental issue, however,
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, they say, inevitably put ourselves at the top and other beings closer to us in proportion to the resemblance
between them and ourselves. Instead, we should accord equal value to every life. Those who take this view recognize, of course,
that a person's life may include the study of philosophy whereas a mouse's life cannot; but they say that the pleasures of
a mouse's life are all that the mouse has, and are as important to the mouse as the pleasures of studying philosophy are to
the most enthusiastic student of the subject.
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 is possible to defend such judgments 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’. 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 being in each case about as good as horse or human lives
can reasonably be expected to be. 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 is 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 horse 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, because 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 mental 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.
As many critics have pointed out, this argument is open to challenge. 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 a 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
animal without at the same time endorsing a preference for the life of a normal human being over that of another human at
a similar intellectual level to that of the nonhuman in the first comparison.
Mill's argument is difficult to reconcile with hedonistic 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.
This chapter has focused on the killing of beings that are self-aware, or at least conscious. It is intended to serve as a basis for the discussions to follow on the killing of nonhuman animals, embryos and fetuses;
those who wish to die; and infants who suffer such severe damage that their parents consider it would be better if the child
were to die. We will consider whether there is anything wrong about taking non-conscious life – the lives of trees or plants,
for instance – in Chapter 10.