Definiciones Conceptuales

We all agree that human life is of great value. The question is how this value should be understood. One thing that the claim that human life is valuable might be thought to entail is that it is a good thing that human, or rational, life exists—that a world is made better by contain- ing it. Perhaps this is so, but what is central to that value is not a matter

of anything’s existence being good in this sense—not, for example, a matter of the world’s being made better by there being more human life rather than less.

It is true that appreciating the value of human life involves seeing that we have strong reason not to destroy it and reason to protect it when we can. Given that we have reason to do these things—to aim at preserving human life and at not destroying it—and given that we believe that others have these reasons as well, we also have reason to think it a bad thing when we or others fail in these aims. But this thought is a derivative one, which follows from the reasons we have to preserve life and not to destroy it. Those reasons themselves do not _ow from the thought that it is a good thing for there to be more human life rather than less. This is shown by the fact that while we have strong reasons to protect human life and not to destroy it, we do not have the very same reasons to create more human life when we can. Insofar as we have reasons to create new life, these are different from, and weaker than, our reasons not to destroy it. But these reasons would be the same if they all _owed from the fact that the existence of a human life is a good thing.

Appreciating the value of human life is primarily a matter of seeing human lives as something to be respected, where this involves seeing reasons not to destroy them, reasons to protect them, and reasons to want them to go well. Many of the most powerful of these reasons, however, are matters of respect and concern for the person whose life it is rather than of respect for human life, or for this instance of human life, in a more abstract sense. The difference between these two forms of respect comes to the fore in cases of euthanasia and suicide.26

Suppose a person is in an irreversible coma. Would it show a lack of the respect called for by the value of human life to end this life by withholding food and other life supports, or to fail to protect it by providing protection against disease? Would a person who faces a life of endless unremitting and incapacitating pain show a lack of respect for his or her own life by seeking to end it? These questions are controversial, but I believe that the answer in both cases is “No.” This suggests that while appreciating the value of human life involves seeing that there are strong reasons for protecting life and for not destroying it, these reasons are restricted by the quali~cation “as long as the person whose life it is has reason to go on living or wants to live.”

Just as murder shows a lack of respect for human life, there can be cases in which suicide does so as well. We might say, of a person who

commits suicide out of a cynical conviction that nothing is worth doing, or out of disappointment at being rejected by a lover, that he or she showed a lack of understanding of the value of life and allowed it to be wasted. One could say the same thing of a person who stayed alive but spent his life in utter idleness or mired in cynical nihilism. What such people have in common with the criticizable suicides just mentioned is a failure to see the reasons they have to go on living, reasons provided, for example, by their possible accomplishments, by the good they might do for others, and by the pleasures they could attain. This leads toward the idea that, at least from the point of view of the person whose life it is, the value of life may be identi~ed with the reasons one has for living it. This would be in line with the conclusion reached earlier, that we have reason to protect a life only insofar as the person whose life it is has reason to go on living it or wants to do so. We might say, then, that recognizing the value of human life is a matter of respecting each human being as a locus of reasons, that is to say, recognizing the force of their reasons for wanting to live and wanting their lives to go better.

This view is still unsatisfactory for at least two reasons. The ~rst is that, as stated, it is open to an “ideal observer” interpretation, which takes appreciating the value of human life to be a matter of recognizing the force of all the reasons that various human beings have. (This is like what Nagel calls the objective point of view.) Unless more is said, this is impossibly unwieldy, since we cannot respond to or even con- template all these reasons at once. It is not adequate simply to say that we are entirely free to choose which of these reasons to respond to (in the way that we are free to choose which, if any, of the various worthwhile forms of excellence we want to give a role in our lives). An adequate account of the value of human life needs to say more about the claim that these reasons have on us.27

The second objection points us in the direction of a solution to this problem. While the view just described recognizes what is distinctive about human or, more generally, rational life by characterizing us as creatures who have reasons, it does not exploit the full depth of this characterization. What it mentions is that we are creatures who have reason to want certain things to happen. This presupposes, but does not mention, that we are creatures who have the capacity to assess reasons and justi~cations. It also does not mention that we have the capacity to select among the various ways there is reason to want a life to go, and therefore to govern and live that life in an active sense.

Appreciating the value of human life must involve recognizing and respecting these distinctive capacities.

Taken together, these two objections suggest the following view. We cannot respond to all the reasons that every human creature has for wanting his or her life to go well; so we must select among these reasons; and we should do this in a way that recognizes the capacity of human beings, as rational creatures, to assess reasons and to govern their lives according to this assessment. In my view the best response to these two considerations is this: respecting the value of human (ra- tional) life requires us to treat rational creatures only in ways that would be allowed by principles that they could not reasonably reject insofar as they, too, were seeking principles of mutual governance which other rational creatures could not reasonably reject. This re- sponds to the problem of selecting among reasons in a way that recognizes our distinctive capacities as reason-assessing, self-govern- ing creatures.28

I do not claim that this is the only possible response to the problem of understanding the requirements of valuing human life, much less that I have offered a strict argument for it. This idea does, however, seem to me the best and most plausible response to the considerations I listed. In the remainder of this book I will argue for this same idea as the best understanding of our ideas of right and wrong, or of “what we owe to each other.” Taken together, these two arguments provide a way of reconciling the general perspective of value with that of moral- ity in the narrow sense.

As I said at the beginning of this chapter, there is often thought to be a sharp tension between these realms—between what is sometimes called “deontological morality” on the one hand and our ideas of value on the other. What I have tried to show here is that this tension is exaggerated. Being valuable is not always simply a matter of being “to be promoted.” Most of the things properly recognized as values have a more complex structure. So rights and duties should not be seen as odd because they do not take this simple form. Moreover, one plausible understanding (to my mind the most plausible) of one para- mount value, the value of human life, leads directly to the core of the morality of right and wrong. Looking back, it seems to me that this is what one should expect: the idea of valuing human life and the idea of respecting one’s duties and other people’s rights ought to be closely related, if not the very same thing. One way for this to be true is the one described by consequentialism, according to which ideas of right,

wrong, and obligation are made subservient to a purely teleological conception of the good. As I have just said, I believe that there is another way to achieve this reconciliation, one that gives a more fundamental role to considerations of right and wrong. I will begin developing that side of my argument in Part II, after considering the idea of well-being in more detail.

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