Being Truly Human

The Limits of Our Worth, Power, Freedom and Destiny

David W. Gooding, John C. Lennox

• Publisher: Myrtlefield House
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781912721016
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

In Book 1 – Being Truly Human, Gooding and Lennox address issues surrounding the value of humans. They consider the nature and basis of morality, compare what morality means in different systems, and assess the dangerous way freedom is often devalued. What should guide our use of power? What should limit our choices? And to what extent can our choices keep us from fulfilling our potential?

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Chapter 1The Basic Value of a Human Being

If we say that human life is valuable, surely we must mean more than that parents who welcome and love a newborn baby should not destroy it, but parents for whom a newborn child is neither wanted nor loved should be free to destroy it. That would reduce the value of life to a mere matter of arbitrary, personal taste.

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The value of life

Without first attempting to define human life—for that could be a long, if not impossible, task—let’s begin by asking: what value do we put on human life? After all, we are all human beings, we are all alive, and what is more, we all have direct personal experience of being alive. We ought, therefore, to be able to decide what value we place on human life; our own of course to start with, yet not merely our own, but other people’s as well.

And let’s be clear what exactly we mean by ‘placing value on human life’. We are not asking: how much have we enjoyed living in the past? Or: are we having any rewarding experiences of life in the present? We are asking: what value do we put on human life in and of itself? Is human life, our own or any other person’s, so valuable that it would be wrong to mistreat it or to diminish it in any way or to destroy it? The answer to this question is fundamental to our attitude to other people, and likewise to ourselves.

So let’s start with a real-life, practical situation that will bring us at once to the heart of the matter.

The question of infanticide

All of us were newborn babies once, and presumably we are grateful that no one practised infanticide on us. But is there anything wrong with infanticide? And if so, what and why?

In ancient Greece the father (or both parents) of an unwanted child was allowed to take the baby, place it in an open box or jar, and set it on the mountainside to be devoured by wild beasts (they thus tried to salve their conscience by pretending that it was not they who killed the child, but wild beasts). The historians Professor M. Cary and Professor T. J. Haarhoff comment that after 200 bc this way of disposing of unwanted children ‘seems to have become frequent |44|enough to keep the Greek population at a stationary level, and even to induce a sharp regression in some cities’.1 Intentionally or not, infanticide seems not only to have been a means by which a family limited the demands on its budget, but to have become also a way of population control.

During the last several decades, hundreds of millions of foetuses, whose brains and nervous systems were already formed, have been aborted because their mothers, or mothers and fathers, did not want them.

The question immediately arises: is such infanticide morally right? The question concerns us, because it is not just an ancient problem. We too were once babies. If for any reason our parents had not wanted us, would it have been morally permissible for them to eliminate us? During the last several decades, hundreds of millions of foetuses, whose brains and nervous systems were already formed, have been aborted because their ­mothers, or mothers and fathers, did not want them.2 Were they not also human? And if they were (though many people would deny it), we could ask the same about them: was it morally right to destroy them?

But to get back to newborn babies, for nobody would deny that they are human beings. Is their life so absolutely valuable that it would be wrong to kill them, even if their parents could not afford to keep them, or if for any reason they did not want them, or if the State wanted to curb excessive population growth?

At the beginning of the last century many people kept a cat to suppress the mice that otherwise would infest the house. Some people still do. If, however, the cat produced a litter of four or five kittens, and the householder did not want them, and nobody else was willing to take them, the householder would put the kittens in a tank of water and drown them. Nobody thought it was morally wrong.

Now many people urge us to believe that human beings are simply animals that by accidental mutation of the genes and subsequent natural selection have by chance evolved further than the other primates. If that is so, on what ground could we say that killing a |45|newborn kitten would not be morally wrong but killing a newborn human would be? What is so special about a human being?

If, as many hold, there is nothing but matter in the universe, and human beings have no soul or spirit, but just like animals are simply a highly evolved form of matter, then why should newborn humans not be done away with as well as the young of animals? What’s the difference?

Someone may suggest at this point: ‘The difference is that humans are more valuable than animals, and that’s why it would be wrong to kill human babies, or any human beings at all at any time for that matter.’

True: to sense that human life is somehow specially valuable is a good beginning. But the terms ‘value’ and ‘valuable’ are commonly used in several different senses. We need, therefore, to examine in what sense human beings may be said to be first valuable, and then more valuable than animals.

The value of human life cannot depend on people’s subjective judgment

Some things have no value in themselves; in regard to value, they are, we say, neutral. They become valuable only when people happen to like them. Take cigarettes, for example. Some people like them; and to these people a packet of cigarettes would be valuable. Other people don’t like them; in fact they think they are only worth putting on the fire. To them they have no value at all.

Can that be what is meant, then, when we say that human life is valuable: if people like a certain human being, that human being is valuable to them and they should not destroy him or her; but if people don’t like a certain human being, that human being is not valuable to them, and they may eliminate her or him?

That sounds, and is, horrific; but that is how some nations sometimes behave. Many Chinese parents apparently prefer sons to daughters for various reasons. In 1979 the Chinese government, alarmed at the exponential growth of the birth rate, passed a law forbidding parents to have more than one child. There is strong anecdotal evidence that in some remoter parts, if the firstborn child turned out to be a |46|girl, the parents quietly killed her, in the hope that their next child would be a boy. And in ancient times one of the Egyptian pharaohs, wishing to subjugate his serfs, laid it down as government policy that daughters born to the serfs could be saved alive; sons were to be killed at birth by the midwives or drowned in the river.

So if we say that human life is valuable, surely we must mean more than that parents who welcome and love a newborn baby should not destroy it, but parents for whom a newborn child is neither wanted nor loved should be free to destroy it. That would reduce the value of life to a mere matter of arbitrary, personal taste. If human life is valuable at all, one would have thought that it must always and every­where be equally valuable, no matter whether people like its possessor or not.

But perhaps someone will object: ‘Newborn babies and adult human beings are not equally valuable. A fully developed human being is surely more valuable than a newborn, undeveloped baby; and an adult who has, say, brilliant artistic scientific or engineering gifts is more valuable than an adult who has none of these gifts, or may even have a learning disability. Doesn’t the gener...

Table of contents

• Illustrations
• Series Preface
• Analytical Outline
• Series Introduction
• 1. The Basic Value of a Human Being
• 2. Human Freedom and the Danger of its Devaluation
• 3. The Nature and Basis of Morality
• 4. Comparative Moralities
• 5. The Role and Power of Humans over Nature
• 6. The Parameters of Human Power
• 7. Human Destiny
• Appendix: The Scientific Endeavour
• Series Bibliography
• Study Questions for Teachers and Students
• Scripture Index
• General Index
• About the Authors