Human Worth

Human Worth:

What's the worth of a human life? What is it about a human life that makes it worth something? That's a hard question: harder than it seems.



What's the worth of the man who drinks at the well, uninvited? None at all, to Sherif Ali: and it is the insight of honor cultures that not everyone is created equal, but that some are better than others. Does that mean that some can be worth nothing, or is there some minimal quality beyond which no human being can fall? "He was nothing," Sherif Ali says, and that is the honest attitude of many to those who get in the way.

"Nothing" in ethics is the equal opposite of infinity: once we have reduced the good of a person to "nothing," you would be irrational if you didn't trade his life for a penny. After all, a penny is worth something.

In the West, we have tried to provide other answers. Let us consider three, as exemplified by a very moving piece on fatherhood. There is Dr. Singer's answer.

As I grew older, I was inspired by Socrates' statement that "the unexamined life is not worth living." Similarly, Aristotle's dictum that man is the animal having "logos," the power of reasoning, impressed me. The notion that the human being is a rational animal made sense, and I internalized it as a basic assumption, as I did Socrates' pronouncement. At San Francisco State University, I became intrigued by the Enlightenment. John Locke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant fascinated me. Who would not want to be enlightened? Who in his or her right mind would choose in favor of a benighted past of superstition, ignorance, and blind faith in custom? I put my faith in reason....

After his birth, as I entered the intensive-care nursery, I was deeply ambivalent, having been persuaded by the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer's advocacy of expanding reproductive choice to include infanticide. But there was my son, asleep or unconscious, on a ventilator, motionless under a heat lamp, tubes and wires everywhere, monitors alongside his steel and transparent-plastic crib. What most stirred me was the way he resembled me. Nothing had prepared me for this, the shock of recognition, for he was the boy in my own baby pictures, the image of me when I was an infant.

Eight months after the birth, a doctor commented, after viewing the results of a CT scan, that his brain looked like "Swiss cheese," it was so full of dead patches.

So from the start, I had to wrestle with the reality of his condition. Martin Luther held the opinion that, because a child such as August was a "changeling"—merely a mass of flesh, a massa carnis, with no soul—he should be drowned. And Singer reasonably would maintain that my son would not qualify as a "person," because he would have no consciousness of himself in time and space.

There is the answer the doctor eventually comes to about his son.

And I agree with Rabbi Harold Kushner when he writes and talks about bad things happening to good people: August's disability does not form a part of "God's plan" and does not serve as a tool for God to teach me or anyone else wisdom. What kind of a God would it be, anyway, to deprive my boy of speech and movement just to instruct me? A cruel and arbitrary God. August's disabilities are not a blessing; but neither are they a divine curse. To traffic in a cosmic economy of blessings and curses is to revert to an ancient prejudice. Indeed, even though August's disabilities offer ample opportunity for public interpretation, they do not mean anything at all in and of themselves—they have no intrinsic significance. They simply are what they are.

That is not to deny that August, along with my daughter and my wife, is the most amazing and wonderful thing that has ever happened to me, for he has allowed me an additional opportunity to profoundly love another human being.... there are limits to reason.

There is the third position, which he understands well enough to articulate it:

And then there are the Christians, who see in August a child of God. Given the educated alternative I just sketched out, that response seems a relief. Here in the South, they come up and say "God bless!," to which, depending on the occasion and the person, I sometimes respond, "This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased."

You've probably sorted out that I have more to say about this, but before I do, I want to hear what you think (and why).