Biological Ethics

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Chapter 15. Value of Biological Life

A. Ruiz Retegui

a) Variety of the vital phenomenon

The various ethical questions that arise in the work of the biologist have as their fundamental point of reference the value of the vital phenomenon: if biological research is so charged with ethical significance, it is because it deals with life, and life demands an attitude of respect and recognition.

But the phenomenon of life is far from being univocal: when we speak of life, we refer to very varied realities and very different values. There are essential differences between protozoan life, plant life, animal life and human life which it would be absurd to ignore by lumping all phenomena together under the homogeneous valuation of the dignity of life. This is why the mere appeal to the dignity of life cannot be an adequate point of reference for biological ethics. In fact, however intense our love for life and our ethical sensitivity, we all have, in practice, more appreciation for a diamond than for an ant, even if we recognise in the latter vital dimensions of great significance and depth that are clearly not to be found in the carbon crystallised in the cubic system.

Leaving aside the borderline situations in which it is difficult to establish unequivocally whether a being is endowed with life or not, we find a very wide gradation of intensity in the life of beings. Even if we affirm that the vital phenomenon is individual and that one either has it or one does not have it, we must recognise that when we speak of life, we do not mean exactly the same thing in the case of some beings as we do in the case of others. The concept of life that is applied to a single-celled being or to a dog is the product of an abstraction, that is to say, of a mental process in which some concrete elements are disregarded in order to affirm exclusively some common properties, such as nutrition, homeostasis, reproduction, and a certain affection with the environment in which it is found. For this reason, the term "life" or "living" is too generic and covers too many different forms for it to be the object of unequivocal reference.

b) Valuing different ways of life

The phenomenon of life is extraordinarily interesting for a mind open to the world and to reality. The biologist devotes his intellectual energies to the study of this phenomenon with dedication and professional rigour.

But interest in "life" can have a wide variety of origins. The phenomenon of life can be interesting from a purely economic point of view. For example, when the production of certain substances can be included in the life process of certain beings, the phenomenon of life is highly profitable, because it makes it possible to obtain these products in a safer, more constant and cheaper way than in the process of technical production. Similarly, the phenomenon of life can be interesting from an aesthetic point of view, or from a recreational point of view, etc.

In a study of biological ethics, we are interested in determining the ethical evaluation of life, i.e. insofar as it is ethically relevant to human freedom. This ethical evaluation must be distinguished from the scientific-biological evaluation, according to which life forms are considered according to their significance in terms of their scientific significance at knowledge . For a zoologist, for example, a particular form of life, i.e. a particular animal, can be of immense value as an illustration or financial aid to fill in of the scientific picture of living beings. In this perspective, unique species or rare specimens are subject to a scientific evaluation that is different from the ethical evaluation at issue here.

But if we are to go beyond the purely abstract consideration of the concept of life, and seek a criterion for a properly ethical evaluation, what reference should we have? The answer to this question has already been given in the chapter on the foundation of ethics: the fundamental ethical value is the human person endowed with absolute dignity and, therefore, the only reality capable of challenging freedom with an absolute challenge, that is, with a properly moral challenge.

c) Absolute dignity of the person and value of life

If we find the forms of biological life that we encounter in the world so interesting and even ethically significant, it is because we see a close relationship between them and our own bodily life. It is the implicit recognition of the analogy between the various forms of life and the bodily life of the absolutely worthy person that makes us understand them as worthy of respect. Life forms challenge us most intensely when they in some way reflect most intensely our own life. Plant life, however interesting it may be from an aesthetic, economic or scientific point of view, demands less consideration from us than the life of an animal, which has sensitivity and gives sample phenomena similar to those we notice in our own human existence. In fact, in order to understand the phenomena of animal behaviour we take as a reference the experiences of our own existence.

In this sense, we must be aware of the peculiar risk of reductionism that occurs when we try to understand man from the knowledge of animal behaviour, forgetting that animal behaviour has previously been understood on the basis of man's self-knowledge of himself. The question that arises is, therefore, to discover the connection that exists between the various forms of life and the human person. This requires, as a preliminary step, to consider with some attention the human corporeality and the value of the biological life of man himself. Then, on the basis of the analogy between human bodily life and non-human life, we will be able to discover the value of the latter.

We are thus faced with two questions: the first is to discover the relationship between man's biological life and his own personal dignity; the second is to discover the relationship between man's bodily life and other forms of life. The first of these questions involves a study of the person in himself, in the various components of his complex structure. The second question is of a different nature and refers to a consideration of the world as a unity.

d) Value of man's physical life

In dealing with the foundation of ethics, we have placed the basis of the absolute dignity of the person and, therefore, of the personal appeal, in the creative love of God, who, by loving the person not in relation to anything else but for himself, constitutes him not as a relative good, but as an absolute good.

But God's creative call to each person is complex. In this call, the direct creation of the soul by God and the generation of the soul by the parents are uniquely composed. The form of this unique composition between creation and generation is not to be understood with the outline of Cartesian dualism according to which God would create the soul and the parents would beget the body. This outline divides man into two substances that would unite accidentally. The classical and Christian tradition has always affirmed the unity of the human person in its bodily and spiritual complexity and therefore affirms that the direct creation of the soul by God and the generation of the body by the parents are composed in such a way that the body is also result of the creative call, for what makes it properly a human body - what in the terminology of classical philosophy is called substantial form - is the spiritual soul created by God. This means that the creative call is not addressed to something that already pre-exists, but it is the call itself that brings it into existence. There are no elements in man that are alien to this call: everything that man is, is a consequence of Creative Love, which marks him in all his dimensions. That is to say, all the dimensions of human existence are directed by the creative call that has been composed with the paternal generation. Therefore, man does not aim towards his fullness only with the so-called spiritual Schools , but with all the dimensions of his being. Morality is not only a matter of the spiritual powers, but is also part of the bodily dimensions. In this respect, it is very illustrative that Scripture states that the Holy Spirit does not only dwell "in the soul" of the justified person: the body itself is inhabited, it is the "temple" of the Spirit. Basically, the theories that deprive the body and bodily gestures of their proper moral significance have dualistic roots. The frequent justification of arbitrary bodily behaviour, to which only the meaning that one wants to give it at any given moment is recognised, has nothing to do with a supposed valuation of the body, but with its degradation to something banal, like a machine that can be used at whim. The seriousness of the consequences of this dualistic outline is more profound than it appears at first glance, since, in addition to stripping the body of its moral - that is, human - significance, it induces a form of domination over it that is violent. Many of the depressions that appear in hard-working people full of good will come from a form of domination over the body similar to the domination of a neutral machine. The "ascetic voluntarism" so typical of a competitive society fits well with the dualistic conception, but has nothing to do with the true dominion of the soul over the body taught by the Christian tradition. The latter conceived that the soul should formally rule the body, but not efficiently, i.e. not from the outside, as a master subdues a slave, or the driver masters the machine. Treated violently, the body suffers, and its complaint often appears in the form of depression, of a lack of vital energy in precisely the area where the spiritual powers are most closely linked: in the nervous system.

In reality, the word spirit does not primarily mean subtle or non-material substance, but direction towards God and others, openness to transcendence. The openness, intrinsically directed towards God and others, which transcends all dimensions of human existence is what formally makes the soul. Therefore, to say that the human body has a soul means that it is not intelligible as a human body exclusively as a material object with its physical properties. The human body is maximally meaningful, as a human being, in the hands and, above all, in the face, which is the same as saying that it is humanly meaningful in its relational dimension. Even in the human bodily dimension protected by modesty, we notice that the body becomes significant not primarily in its pure components Materials, but above all in its showing itself. It is not the contemplation of the viscera that is prurient or exciting, but the body in a trance of personal communication. Experience sample shows that what is prurient is not so much the pure nudity as the undressing, i.e. the situation of communication and offering. If certain situations of nudity are impudent, it is more because of what they imply of "finding" than of the mere fact of being uncovered.

However, the human body is material and therefore subject to the laws governing the material, namely the laws governing biological behaviour. In its material and organic aspect or character, the human body is "a piece of nature". In this perspective, the human body is an organic unity and can therefore be considered as a biological "whole of meaning". It is this biological whole of meaning that positive science considers in its study.

But this totality of meaning is not, as we have seen, the totality of the person: there are aspects of the person, and they are precisely the most fundamental and proper to the person as such, which are not included in the biological totality of meaning. The person is only fully understood when his corporeality is integrated into a greater, fuller totality: the personal totality that includes his relational dimension. This is why the whole of biological meaning is not the moral reference. Physical or biological life is not a moral value, but has to be integrated into the personal totality, which is what constitutes a whole of human and therefore moral significance. That this is so is also a matter of experience: in the trance of approaching inevitable death, i.e. of the loss of physical life, the dignified attitude of man is not one of angry rejection, but of serene acceptance. This indicates that physical life is not a moral value, for man is never worthy of accepting the loss of a moral value, he must always resist it with all his strength: in fact, moral values - loyalty, justice, faith, etc. - must be defended even at the cost of his own life. In turn, physical life can be given up not only in defence of a moral value, but also to preserve other lives or to protect or promote other human values.

These considerations are necessary to avoid the risk of arguing morally from the body in its aspect of "totality of biological meaning". On the contrary, the moral reference is the human person - in its corporeality and transcendence - which includes - by relativising it - the unity of biological meaning.

When scientism dominates the understanding of man, his openness to self-giving to God and to others disappears from the horizon. The immediate consequence is to situate the moral reference in the unity of biological meaning. This means that the supreme value will then be physical, biological life, and therefore the moral reference will be this supreme value. The resulting ethic is "hygienism", the cult of the body, of health, the "moral" prohibition of smoking... The manifestations of this ethical attitude can be seen in the lack of limits to medical action on people, therapeutic aggressiveness, and the "anything goes" to keep the body's biological system going. It is a hedonistic ethic, because what can be expected from pure bodily functioning is pleasure, and sooner or later, paradoxically, but consequently, it is an ethic that justifies euthanasia and suicide. When the "bag of biochemistry" is irreparably damaged and painful, there is nothing more to expect from it.

On another level, the exasperatedly ecologist positions that advocate a total immersion of man in nature and the total equalisation of all species of living beings are not an adequate protest against the invasion of technology, they are not a post-modern phenomenon, they do not follow the modern attempt to fully understand and dominate the world with a scientistic perspective, but are one of its natural manifestations.

Joining these considerations with what has been said in the fundamentals of the ethical dimension of man, we can summarise by saying that it is necessary to distinguish, without separating, between the different meanings that "life" has in man:

a) the full life of man, the object of the creative design, which is that which has absolute value, because it is that which has been willed by Creator Love for its own sake.

b) life in the present situation, which is a situation average, which points towards the absolute value of the fullness of life, but which does not yet realise it; it is only the inception of that fullness, a time of collaboration of human freedom with the creative call to realise its own truth and reach its fullness.

c) physical life as the material substratum of life in time, as the principle of collaboration with the Creator, through its sexuality, for human multiplicity and the condition of the worldliness of plural human existence.

e) Value of non-human life

Non-human life can connect with the person in his or her absolute dignity, and thus become the object of "relatively" moral interpellation, through its relation to the corporeality of the person. We have already pointed out that the physical life of man is not properly a moral value, but it is intimately related to it, for it is the physical life of a person that is absolutely worthy. Non-human life is further removed from the fundamental moral referent. Now, in order to determine a criterion for valuing non-human life, we must find out how it is related to human life.

Here, too, the starting point must be the consideration of Creative Love. If, as we have seen, man is the only creature of this world willed by himself, the other creatures are not willed by themselves and are therefore not absolute goods, but relative goods or values, for they have been created in an act of Creative Love which does not stop at them, but is properly directed towards man. The appearance of the various forms of life in the history of the universe is not abrupt and discontinuous. The narrative with which the Bible begins does not necessarily mean that the Creator made each of the creatures and living beings appear directly out of nothing and placed them in the world in such a way that everything formed a harmonious whole. The profound meaning of the biblical narrative is that in creation there is a progressive perfecting of being and life that culminates in the special intervention of God with which man appears. We could say that the whole world was created in the act of creative love directed towards the human person. Non-human creatures have not been properly created, but con-created, for they have not been the object of their own independent creative act. This has two important consequences for our problem:

First, it gives us a vision of the world as a unity. The world is not a composite of autonomous and fully meaningful creatures in their own right that have been co-ordinated and harmoniously composed to constitute the unity of order in the universe. That is, the order of the universe is not something ulterior that accesses the already constituted creatures. We could say that the unity of the universe, that is, the whole of the creatures, precedes, in order of nature, not temporally, each of the creatures. Certainly this view of the world as a unity presents a difficulty for our understanding, for our way of knowing is directed first of all to the individual realities, and only subsequently do we reach the unities of order. This is why the unity of order seems naturally weaker to us, and we tend to see the universe as a composite of carefully ordered realities. This vision, like an inventory, is strongly reinforced by the positivist perspective which tends to dismantle the world by the meticulous analysis of its constituent elements, in order to reassemble it according to the order imposed by the will of the dominating man. It is then vain to try to find any real relationship between the forms of life that would allow us to reach the link between the non-human forms of life and the life of man in his corporeality: the various forms of existence are mere pieces of the universal jigsaw puzzle, and as such, unrelated in themselves.

The creationist vision of the universe, by considering the human person as the only creature willed by himself, affirms, and this is the second consequence, that the profound order that exists in the world is not legal but human, that is, it does not come from a careful composition of pre-existing elements, but from the ordination to man. Therefore, when modern man formulates the pretension of building a rational world, that is to say, a world according to the measure of his reason, he is trying to emulate the Creator. This project has, however, no guarantee of success because it is by no means guaranteed that human reason can fully recompose the world that it has previously dismantled by its scientific analyses.

If the whole world has been willed in the act by which God the Creator constitutes the person, then every creature carries in itself its reference to man, for the Creator Love that gave it existence was itself referred to the human person.

In the classical tradition this intrinsic ordering of creatures to man did not receive an explicit formulation because it tended to consider each creature primarily in isolation and somewhat forgot the depth of human completion that vertebrates the whole universe. Nevertheless, he pointed to this ordering when he spoke of the real gradation of perfection among beings, according to which the less perfect is for the more perfect.

Nor can evolutionary scientism, insofar as it clings to an ateleological materialism, substantiate or even illustrate the human ordering of the world.

However, those theories of evolution which admit an intrinsic teleology - expressed in the existence of a programme in the evolutionary process - even with all the necessary reservations and rectifications, can be harmonised with the doctrine of creation, and illustrate, in their own sphere, the real linkage - not only in the order we can reach on our knowledge- between the various forms of life, and even more, between the various forms of being, with man.

Certainly biology, as a positive science, only accounts for the experimental manifestations of evolution, just as human physiology can only account for the physiological manifestations of man's mental activity. Just as it would be scientistic and materialistic reductionism to deny man's spirituality on the basis of the findings of the physiology of the nervous system, so it would be materialistic dogmatism to say that biological evolution is in conflict with creation. On the contrary, physiology confirms, to the best of its ability, the unity of spirit and subject in man; in the same way, the evolution detected and described by biologists confirms, to the best of the ability of science, that nature is ordered, also diachronically, to man. If before we said that evolution enriches our knowledge of creation, now we must affirm that creation makes our intelligence of evolution fuller and more coherent.

This perspective, the creationist one illustrated by evolution, explains to us that human bodily life is the beginning of the value of all forms of being and life in the universe, since all of them have appeared as a consequence of God's creative call to man. In a somewhat figurative way it could be said that God's call to man did not lead directly to man, but rather to a subject that evolved from the initial chaos - the earth was confused and empty - and culminated in the appropriate arrangement of the human body. In non-human beings, human bodily life is found partially and incoherently. This is why we said at the beginning of this chapter that it is the bodily life of man that gives meaning and gives reason for the intelligibility of non-human forms of being and life, and that we understand life because we experience it in ourselves, and because we understand ourselves we can understand other living beings. In this way all beings and, in particular, living beings present themselves to us and are really objective goods in themselves because of their relationship to the bodily life of man, which in turn participates in the absolute value of the person.

To say that evolution is complete towards man does not mean, as is obvious, that all forms of life evolve towards the human body. In that case, the remaining life forms would all be biological fossils or meaningless residues of the process of evolution towards man. But this conclusion would only be logical if the human body were self-sufficient and did not need the world, and the other life forms, to exist as such. The completion towards man, that is, the ordering of all creation towards man, affirms that every creature and every form of life is ordered diachronically or synchronically towards man.

For this reason, the closer a form of life is to the corporeal life of man - even if it is not in the concrete phylum that has led through biological evolution to the human - the more valuable it is in itself, and this is how we recognise it. It would therefore be a mistake - the result, as noted above, of an abstract approach - to equate all forms of life and to understand life in a univocal sense. Life phenomena have a very wide range of meanings: the reaction of a tree to a mechanical aggression is not the same as the pain of a dog, and the pain of the most complex animal and human suffering are much less comparable. Nor are an animal's ability to see and the human gaze comparable, even though materially and physiologically they are quite similar. Although the anatomy of one and the other has analogous elements, the person has a face, a countenance, the animal does not.

To sum up, we can conclude that living beings are not valuable only because they serve to provide useful elements - environment, food, etc. - to the man who dominates nature (such a perspective could authorise an authentic utilitarian exploitation of animals), but because they are like traces of the ontological path through which man, responding to God's creative call, has been emerging from nothingness towards the concrete reality of his bodily existence.