The sacred value of human life
Gonzalo Herranz, department of Humanities Biomedical, University of Navarra, Spain
VIIth session at doctoral course 2002-2003:
instructions cultural and anthropological aspects of the teaching at the University
Pamplona, 2002
The inevitable asymmetry of the concept
The disruptive effect of scientistic reductionism
Difficulty and evidence of topic
Greetings, with special thanks to reference letter to the doctoral students of the technical school of Industrial Engineers of San Sebastian.
The sacred value of human life is topic which can be approached from various angles. It is a matter of considerable cultural, anthropological, ethical, juridical and religious dimensions. Having entrusted it to me, I think that the organizers wish that, without renouncing to deal with the essence of the problem, I will try to give it an ethical-medical approach .
Indeed, this is a classic topic of medical ethics. In fact, medicine was born with the recognition of the immeasurable value of every human life. I would like to know how the first physician appeared in the world. I take every opportunity to recall that the birth of medicine as a science coincides with the incorporation of ethics into the internship of the art of healing. This occurred when Hippocrates concluded, on the one hand, that disease was not a punishment from the divinities to be cured by magic and incantation, but a natural phenomenon, whose causes and mechanisms needed to be clarified in order to prevent and cure it. And when he established, on the other hand, that the physician must declare publicly and under oath taken before the gods of Olympus, that he will respect the life of his patient and that he will not take advantage of his position of advantage to abuse him.
I am convinced that this ethical commitment to respect life - established in the clauses of the Oath by which the physician forbids abortion, euthanasia and cooperation in the patient's suicide - is not only to create the necessary confidence of the sick in their physician. It is also to keep constantly open the way to the research of the disease and its remedies. In this way, little by little, in an endless process, the physician will never abandon his patients, he will study them attentively and care for them diligently. And, as far as this class concerns us, he will consider the life of each one of them as precious and intangible.
I will not dwell here on the history of the notion of the sanctity of human lives. Suffice it to know that, at times, it was a matter that occupied the center of many disputes; and that, for centuries, it has rested in the peace of general acceptance.
I prefer to begin by drawing attention to a fact, which may serve as a starting point, and which seems to me to be of considerable interest.
The inevitable asymmetry of the concept
We can never cease to be amazed at the difference between physicians and patients when considering the value of life. Man wants to live. It is true that, unfortunately, some human beings, under the influence of deep depression or the desolating experience of loneliness and withdrawal, or when suffering unbearable pain, life can become a very heavy and tiring burden, from which they would like to free themselves at any cost, even the cost of life itself.
But for the common of mortals and, more than in spite of, because of that same mortality, life, their own life, is presented to them as the first value and necessary condition of all the others. It is ordinary that the certainty and even the proximity of death raises the value of that dwindling remnant of life that remains to us. The presence of illness and the nearness of the end turn life into something unique, of priceless value.
But the doctor sees many patients every day, dozens of them, some of them crossing the critical status between life and death. With all of them, he has to work hard. But he cannot be involved with everyone, nor can he be totally involved: he must maintain equanimity. Although there are intensive care units in our hospitals, he cannot always give them all the intense attention they would like. For the patient, everything seems too little, because his life is unique, it is essential to him: he would like to fight for it relentlessly and without sparing anything, he asks to receive the best possible care.
There is an unbridgeable distance between the patient's place of mind and the physician's place of mind. Only by having a deep sense of the sacred value of every human life is it possible for the physician to approach the patient's position. It is a difficult matter. It is therefore necessary, from time to time, for all of us, physicians or not, to stop and think for a moment about the sacred value of human life, in the living human being.
On the medallion of the members of the Pontifical Academy for Life is engraved a motto, which says "Homo vivens gloria Dei", the glory of God is the living man. We are the greatest thing God has made. This may seem like fatuous anthropocentrism, but we are something of infinite value. Only knowing that we are the glory of the living God can we understand what it is to kill.
A contemporary philosopher writes to this purpose: "A man: that marvel, that miracle, through which the universe, with all that it contains, is seen, thought, loved, known, oriented, and received as a sign, as a symbol, as a word. Through each human consciousness is produced the birth of all that exists in this world, each consciousness with its core topic staff , with its own register, recreates in a certain way the world. The death of a human being, whoever he may be, is the death of a universe.
It would be necessary for every human being to experience an almost physical respect for the miracle of this singular man who lives in him, who makes him a man. The fact that empirical explanations, more or less mechanistic, can be given for this miracle, by means of DNA and hereditary informatics, only makes the miracle of each human being more astonishing and dazzling. Each of us should have an almost physical respect for himself and for others: for the lungs, the brain, all his viscera, and for the muscles, the nerves, all the tissues. It is not a question here of 'virtues' in the moralistic sense of the term, but of a much deeper, almost religious respect. For each one of us has been entrusted with a man, a human life, which we must take care of. And the physician, in each patient, is entrusted with a life, a living man. It is there, in my opinion, where the rights of man are planted, where they find their substance and their exigency".
The philosopher, author of these lines, was the Swiss thinker Jeanne Hersh, now dead, a very important figure B of secular thought.
Thus, we are not dealing with a concept that springs from monotheistic religions: this is a universal notion, shared by people of all civilizations and times. John Paul II sends his message of the Gospel of Life to all people of good will: "The Gospel of life is not exclusively for believers: it is for everyone. The topic of life and its defense and promotion is not the prerogative of Christians alone. Although it receives extraordinary light and strength from faith, it belongs to every human conscience that aspires to truth and is attentive and concerned for the fate of humanity. There is certainly a sacred and religious value in life, but it is by no means a question only of believers: indeed, it is a value which every human being can understand even in the light of reason and which therefore necessarily concerns everyone".
The disruptive effect of scientistic reductionism
I believe that what has been said sufficiently reveals that human life is sacred, precious, full of dignity. Precisely for this reason, it is useful for us from time to time to escape for a moment from the overwhelming influence of reductionist scientism, a measles that tends to attack scientists, whether they are young or old, and often leads them to look down their noses at ethics. We could do with a more panoramic view of human life.
It might do us good to look for a moment at the simplest living human being: the human embryo. For a healthy mind, there is a human being, as vulnerable as you like, but as human as each one of us was when we began to live. For a mind trained in a strong biologism, the young embryo is simply an "accumulation of cells". And if you have been trained in a molecular biology laboratory , you prefer to define it as an agglomeration of macromolecules, so interesting and complex that deciphering their structure and relationships is a task worth devoting the entire degree program of researcher.
But this mind imbued with mechanicism is not capable of seeing beyond and is blind to the fundamental question that, in addition to being molecules and cells, it is a human being, called to unfold a life, to fulfill a destiny. To reduce it to a cellular accumulation, to molecular agglomeration, to mechanisms and interactions is to rob the embryo of its humanity. And also to take life away from it, because the mechanistic paradigm, as Grene affirms, pretends that only the non-living is real because it admits only explanations formulated in terms of molecules and mechanisms, which are dead, mechanical things. The living is then understood only through non-living categories, biology thus becomes a thanatology.
Undeveloped idea: The ideas of Edwards and his acolytes: Godfrey et al.
And since, when we want to reflect on medical ethics, we have to refer to the data of human biology, it is happening more and more that bioethics is constructed with dead pieces, or with pieces dispossessed of their humanity. Thus it turns out that frozen embryos are mutated into pre-embryos that only serve to provide stem cells, patients in a vegetative state are corpses with apparent life whose organs can be recycled by transplantation, or fetuses with trisomy 21 are abortions with no apparent usefulness.
Kirkegaard drew attention to the plunder that the philosophies of utility had practiced, already in plenary session of the Executive Council nineteenth century, on human life, by turning the living and real into the dead and fictitious, as a consequence of the fundamental error of applying the modes and procedures of crude naturalistic scientism to the inquiry into the nature and existence of man, a conduct that for the Danish philosopher amounted to blasphemy.
It is not worth continuing on this path of errors. It is time to get down to business.
Difficulty and evidence of topic
When one tries to delimit the topic, and tries to go to the great works of reference letter to get a good thematic skeleton on which to build the topic, one finds that German bioethics lexicons, American encyclopedias, British dictionaries, do not include a entrance that says sanctity or sacredness of life, or are content to point out a reference letter cross to issues such as abortion, euthanasia, murder or suicide.
It seems that topic is of little interest to today's bioethicists. It did in the early days of bioethics and in the tradition of Catholic medical morality prior to 1960, when it was customary to speak of man as steward, not owner, of the sacred gift of life. But there is a prevailing conviction that everything that needs to be said on the subject has already been said, that topic has been exhausted. Shils, the publisher of a major collection of articles on life and death, is often quoted in this context, who, back in the 1960s, said that "to people who are not murderers, concentration camp bosses, or dreamers of sadistic fantasies, the sacred inviolability of human life presents itself as something so self-evident that it seems superfluous to think about it".
If one searches the bibliography and goes first to the indexes, one finds that the terms "sacredness of life" and its homonym "sanctity of life" are filled with content and form an intelligible mosaic of ideas when composed with other terms such as human dignity, reverence for life. A typical case is Evangelium vitae, the encyclical sent by Pope John Paul II to all people of good will. Taking the internet version and doing a search for sanctity of life, human dignity or the person, offers us a kind of kaleidoscope of the enormous force and versatility of these expressions.
What does sanctity of life mean? When something is declared holy, consecrated, canonized, it is meant to imply that something is marked and protected by a religious sanction; that something is dedicated or consecrated to God. And that, by virtue of that dedication, it is linked to the very holiness of God, that it participates in some way in it, and that, therefore, it should be treated with a reverence proportionate to its proximity to God. Something is touched by God, and becomes in a certain way intangible for man. Something enters into the orbit of God's honor, and must be reverenced by man. Divinity protects the holy and sacred from violation, from mistreatment, from contempt.
The notion has religious roots, because the only strong guarantee of that inviolable intangibility and of that prestige and honor can only come from God.
But it is also an expression of the purely human value of dignity, of the patent excellence of man among the beings of the world. There is a basic human holiness, which has nothing to do with lay holiness, that informs what is distinctively and genuinely human, that distinguishes what is most precious in the society of men.
It is a dimension that was present in paganism [Sallust defined holiness as "qualitas illa, qua res venerabiles et inviolabiles sunt"], and that appears in the ceremonial surrounding secular institutions, oaths and promises, judicial sentences, corporate dignities, relationships between people.
It is important to note that not only in bioethical debates, but also in the documents in which the social consensus crystallizes, the notion of sanctity of life appears with B frequently. It is not clothed in the absolute character with which God has commanded us to respect his human creatures, but in the form of more or less binding commitments to respect life. But in legal, political and academic circles, respect for human life, as a civil substitute for the sanctity of life, is legal tender, employee with increasing ease and naturalness.
Undeveloped sections:
I. Holiness is absolute inviolability.
II. Holiness is reverence and veneration for life.
III. USA-Europe contrast
Putting euthanasia here
The study of the bibliography, sample that the topic sacredness or its homonym sanctity of life is intimately intertwined with that of the dignity of the human being.
It occupied a large part of the debates of the early years, symbolic of the confrontation of consciences in the face of the permanent conflicts of abortion, the destruction of embryos, euthanasia and the financial aid suicide.
It has been pretended to turn it into a discussion that confronts religion and secularism.
The religious tradition of the West has always emphasized the sanctity of human life. It has always been considered as a gift received from God, which constitutes one as a worthy and spiritual being, capable of giving meaning and value to reality. That life is holy, because it is given as a gift, a gift, places man in a plan, placed in the providential care of God.
In Judaism, Jewish law and Talmudic tradition impose the duty to mitigate suffering, especially in the final moments of life. And that above any other consideration, even at the cost of not leaving one's temporal and spiritual affairs settled because of the drowsiness of analgesia and sedation. But this important and unpostponable relief cannot be bought at the cost of life itself.
This idea of the absolute prohibition to destroy innocent human lives is based on the attribution that Judaism makes to human life of possessing an infinite value. The infinite is indivisible: any temporal fraction of life, in this context, however limited its expected duration, however limited its biological quality may be, leave , still possesses an infinite, non-negotiable value.
And this does not apply to the value of the sometimes precarious residue of terminal life and the radical prohibition of euthanasia, but to the life of every human being. In Judaism, the life of a man is dispensable only when that man seriously threatens the life of another. Therefore, abortion is allowed when the continuation of the pregnancy or the spontaneous termination of childbirth seriously threatens the life of the mother: the life of the mother prevails over that of the fetus. But outside this status, human life must be respected: it is of infinite value. The reason given is very suggestive: to kill a man, any man, Jew or Gentile, is like killing all men. For to kill a man is to kill also his children, and his children's children, the entire population pyramid that derives from a man and that merges him with the whole of humanity.
Undeveloped example: Chaim Potok. My name is Asher Lev. Scene of the reading of the father, rabbi, from the Book of Sanhedrin.
Post-Christian thought offers a very different vision of the world and of life. In that vision the world is presented as a blind, impersonal, purely material universe, without spirit or guide, made of mass and energy, evolving by necessity and chance, empty of meaning and value, in which, by chance, intelligent life arises, capable of knowledge and volition. Man is capable of self-consciousness and is endowed with the capacity to transform the universe. But he does so in a world in which there is no realm goal of principles to guide and inspire his plans and desires, no divine law with which human law must conform, integrate.
What characterizes human life in this view is self-consciousness, which creates desires and interests, needs and satisfactions, immediate joys and hopes. The body and biological processes are of a piece with the merely natural, common with the animal, except insofar as their functioning can be controlled, transformed, mastered, reduced to instrument by technique. From this point of view, corporeality and personality are very different realities: the staff is the distinctively human, that which expresses itself in self-consciousness, self-determination. (grade incomplete: Grisez/Boyle, 13;14).
How can we explain this flagrant antinomy of sacred life, invested with dignity, inviolable, unavailable, as opposed to manipulated, instrumental life, available? How can we understand that God lends Himself, as the author of life, to be called to slavishly obey man: man who fertilizes human lives in the tube of essay? And if the overwhelming dynamics of rebellious ingenuity is not stopped, how to explain that God cooperates in the creation of men in his image and likeness that are cloned copies of another, that result from parthenogenetic activation, or that result from jumping the inter-species barriers?
There are predictors of the future who predict that the natural and humanizing model of the transmission of human life will be left aside, and we will proceed to the Huxleyan production of artificial men, betas or gammas.
And these beings will be human beings, in whose origin there will always be a creative act of God. "Human life is sacred because from its beginning it involves "the creative action of God" and always remains in a special relationship with the Creator, its only end. God alone is Lord of life from its beginning to its end: no one, under any circumstances, can claim the right to kill an innocent human being directly".
God proclaims himself absolute Lord of the life of man, created in his image and likeness. Therefore, human life has a sacred and inviolable character, in which the very inviolability of the Creator is reflected. This is the ethical aspect of being imago Dei. In creating, God leaves a seal: every human being, whatever his race, origin and condition, is God's workmanship.
The ethical dignity of the human being, seen from God, not from sociologies and cultures, is universal, admits no exceptions. Even in what could be called the "errors of God". This is the title of a book by Charles Bosk on the ethics of prenatal diagnosis.
God is at the origin of each one, lending his image. In the child begotten in the dignity of marriage and the family, and in the adulterous, extramarital child, in the one who is the strange fruit of an act of violence and the one who is born in the sophisticated conditions of laboratory.
When I said this a few months ago, a student asked me: And if cloning is possible, if the problems of parthenogenesis are solved, if we get to have children copied from other human beings, fatherless children born from the virginal activation of an oocyte, is God at the origin of these children?
"Yes," I answered. If they are human beings, and obviously they are or will be, at their origin there is a creative and loving act of God, who creates them and welcomes them as children. The sin of the sorcerer's apprentices is great, but the children are innocent."
So, he told me, God is brought in and carried along, he is forced to follow the baton of the men of ACT (Advanced Cell Technology Inc., business dedicated to stem cell treatments: grade from reviewer).
Yes, I could not think of a better explanation than the one offered by the parable of the prodigal son, which can serve as a metaphor for the rebelliousness of science. The house of the prodigal's father is the house of touch me Roque, where the children do what they want and where the father does not seem to be in charge. Give me the part of the inheritance that corresponds to me, says the little one. I will not go in to celebrate his return, says the other. A chaotic house, a father who seems to be a very poor educator and children who do not seem to love him very much and who do whatever they want.
And it is also the house where the father sends the servants and administrators and they do everything with a high efficiency Degree : the next day half of the inheritance was exchanged in hard cash. The son returns, and in a few moments the orders (kill the fattened calf, bring the orchestra, groom the prodigal, put on the tunic and the ring) are fulfilled: in a matter of moments, the fattened calf is steaming on the dining table, the musicians are playing the favorite symphony, the son is clean and well groomed, wearing tunic and jewels.
Looking at what is happening, we can also conclude that assisted reproduction is a poorly governed house, where some things are up to no good and others work with prodigious efficiency. The sanctity of life is in tatters, the cryopreservation tanks are overflowing with embryos, the reproductive combinatorics are out of control.
The Church, in Donum vitae, says "there is only one worthy place to bring a man into the world: conjugal love in an act of complete love, where the union of bodies is the symbol and reality of the love of persons, where openness to life remains respected".
Fletcher comes along and says: the coital transmission of human life does not distinguish us from animals. The reproduction of laboratory is infinitely more humane, although less fun, because everything there is deliberate, calculated, controlled and that is what makes us human. Love is replaced by efficiency. And there are the cryopreservation thermoses of the world with hundreds of thousands of frozen embryos.
God is a Father who loves. But he knows that without freedom there is no love. He knows that it is useless to impose love by decree. But he has infinite patience and waits for mistakes to be recognized, sins to be confessed, and resolutions of amendment to be decided. He lets it be done, but he tells us that human life is sacred. And that, for this reason, he will not fail to be a severe judge of every violation of the commandment "Thou shalt not kill".