Reprise: Valuing Life

On stem cells, roses, and the fallacies inherent in the “culture of life” philosophy.

All life has intrinsic value.

I was inspecting our new roses this weekend, removing pests, fertilizing the soil after this month’s nearly incessant rains, removing any weeds lest the beautiful, fragrant flowering hedge in my dreams become choked with noxious sow thistle and dead leaves. Spider mites, aphids, ants, sow bugs… sow thistle, three kinds of grasses, a wild cucumber vine, and what I think might have been a cottonwood sapling.

If all life has intrinsic value, why am I destroying so much of it to preserve so little? Aren’t sow bugs and wild-cucumber vines “life,” too? Don’t they have equal intrinsic value to the rose?

I value life. My moral and ethical position has always been to do what is necessary to preserve life — except, apparently, when it comes to my roses. Or at mealtime, come to think of it. I’ll happily sacrifice a chicken’s life for my family’s, and those organic salad greens didn’t stand an evolutionary chance against a harvester’s knife.

Hmmm. If all life has intrinisic value, then why is it that some life is valued more than other life? I would wager that most of you rose enthusiasts nodded along knowingly as you read that first paragraph. Since every one of you has to eat something in order to survive, I’d imagine you’re right with me on the salad argument too (if not the poor, deceased chicken). No reasonable person would quibble or complain about crushed spider mites or the green death implied in that lovely salad. Some life, we know, must be sacrificed so that other life can endure. This is a reality that most mature persons come to understand: Life thrives on death.

If all life has intrinsic value, as I know it does, then why is some life “valued” more highly than others? Why is it all right for me to crush spider mites, but not that annoying old biddy next door? Why is it okay to catch and eat salmon, but not whales?

It becomes obvious, doesn’t it? Sure, all life has intrinsic value, but some life forms have more value, or significance, than others. We practice this every moment of every day, despite our rhetoric. It’s just not politically correct to talk about it. “We’re all equal strands in the web of life!” as modern ecophilosophers claim. “All strands are equally valuable. There is no strand more imporant than others.”

All the while they’re slicing up that eggplant for dinner.

It’s another of those circumstances where we are, most of us, mired in our cultural hypocrisy. We claim we believe one thing, but in practice it’s quite another. The question for reasonable persons becomes one of how to rate, rank, or value differing life forms to be sure
that what we’re sacrificing at any given time is for the greater good, the common weal.

Some of the rankings are subtle, and Deity knows I am not qualified to sit in judgement. Does a Serb outrank a Croat? Are Arab Muslims somehow better than African Muslims? Should a person immobilized with Multiple Sclerosis be ahead of, or behind, a quadriplegic war veteran?

I am not being facetious. Nor am I sure those questions are worth anyone’s time and attention — nonetheless you’ll find the answers to them being made at our nation’s State and federal levels, every day. If my government is making those decisions for me, I surely want to know what criteria they’re using to do it.

Some of the rankings, however, are just incredibly obvious, and should be especially plain to anyone who got through an Ivy League school: Mere cellular life should never trump the meaning and significance in a fully-formed human life. I’ll grant you that if you wiped human beings off the face of the earth, cellular life would still remain, but you still won’t find a group of cells composing a symphony or a sonnet. Or committing atrocities in Guantanamo Bay either, for that matter.

If I had to choose between cellular organisms and that MS patient, I’d choose the human patient every time. Which life is more significant? Which has more value? It seems so obvious, doesn’t it? You’ll pour boiling water down an ant hill, eradicate pests in a corn field, harvest wheat and chard and maybe even beef for your dinner, all to improve what you perceive as your “quality of life.” Why not harvest stem cells from cellular organisms to improve life, too?

It’s time to throw over a “culture of life” that would rather see fully-formed human beings suffer than sacrifice a few blastocytes to do research to relieve that suffering. These are humans with lives full of significance, lives lived among other humans, lives who have touched, loved, laughed, comforted, cajoled, and otherwise engaged in LIFE to whatever extent they were meant. To say that those blastocyte cells have equal signficance is to refute life, and its dependence on death, not value it.

Quote of the Day: “Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live. It is asking others to live as one wishes to live” –Thomas Macaulay