People moralize over “lives”. “500 lives were lost Sunday”, you might hear. This denotation seems convenient when we define a “life” as a homo sapien from the age of 0 to the time his heart stops beating.
But when you probe the gray areas, does this stand up? Are conjoined twins one life or two? Is a single human cell a life? What about a human heart? What about a beating body without a brain? Are these “lives”?
What about microbes? What about female mammals that are pregnant?
After thinking about this issue for some time, the term “life”, as used in ethical discourse, has begun to strike me as arbitrary and useless.
I don’t believe there’s any universally agreed upon definition of life, no. Most definitions run into problems somewhere – external characteristics could be, for example, feeding, growth, and reproduction, but then fire does all that, too. One might also add an ability to adapt to environmental changes (i.e. to evolve), but this already leads to differing classifications, since viruses can evolve, but not reproduce without the aid of host cells. The perhaps most encompassing, but also somewhat subtle characteristic is the ability to keep its internal entropy constant/decrease it by feeding on ‘negative entropy’, or negentropy.
Matters become even more muddled when talking about the creation of ‘new life’. The first problem that phrase runs into is that there is never any actual creation of new life happening – after all, we don’t create our children abiogenetically, no, the whole process is quite thoroughly and enjoyably biological in nature. New life is life from non-life, and neither sperm nor egg cells are in any way non-living things, so that creation of new life is in fact just a continuation of existing life – there’s no death in between, not even a little one, French claims to the contrary notwithstanding.
That said, I don’t think the term life is useless as such – you could grind me up and dissolve me into chemical components, and you’d get something that, on a molecular basis, isn’t different from me, the living organism; yet, on some higher order, it’s pretty clear that there’s a difference between a vat of goo and a living being, and that difference lies in the organization of the matter I am made out of. ‘Life’ is what we call that organization.
It may be arbitrary but it’s not useless. From an ethical standpoint I don’t think there is much concern about non-sentient lives, so I would be disinclined to worry about what a “life” is to a bacterium or a virus.
For humans in particular, there is a grey zone between a fully developed human being with a normal brain and the anencephalic one with little more than the most rudimentary brain-stem function. It’s arbitrary–a problem of language–to decide which one is truly “alive.” We face this problem in medicine all the time when higher cortical functions check out before the circulatory system does. There is something about the brain as the seat of our sentience that makes it a practical–if arbitrary–criterion for us being “alive” as opposed to being an interesting combination of chemical processes.
The fact that the term “lives” is shorthand for some more expanded definition does not make it a useless term, and the existence of definitional shades or liguistic overlap does not mean that there is no actual distinction which can be made between a human life and a bacterium for the purposes of establishing moral guidelines.
Sentience is not a have or have-not issue - there are various degrees of sentience, and it is the fact that there is a broad spectrum of sentience within nature that makes the concept morally dubious.
Let’s distinguish between using the term “lives” in a convenient manner that everyone understands (“five thousand lives were lost”) and its use in actual ethical discourse. Generally, in ethical discourse, the term “life” is used to argue that a specific collection of cells counts as a single ethical unit, and that it is at the level of this unit, or “life”, that we are to make moral judgments. Hence, human blastocysts and 40-year-old women both have “lives” according to many pro-life ethical theorists because both clumps of cells constitute “lives” in their views.
When we start considering the moral status of non-human life, matters don’t get easier. There is an enormous range of sentience between species. To say that a slug and a grizzly bear are both a “life” for one reason or another - say, that they both have some sort of mental experience or that they both have unique sets of genes - is, in my mind, to put oneself on incredibly shaky ethical ground. To be so egalitarian as to say that human zygotes and adult humans have equal rights because they are both “lives” is no more rational than saying that flatworms and humans have equal rights because they are each living out their own “lives”.
For this reason, I agree that the term “life” is legitimate and effective in certain circumstances, but I also think that it usually muddles up ethical discourse when it is used in that particular context.
Its grey at both edges. Is someone who is ‘brain dead’ alive?
Last fall my grandmother died. She slipped into a coma rather quickly - it was then four days until her death. But she was “gone” when she was in that coma.
I can’t sort out if your concern is that “life” is too amorphous a word to be an adequate substitution for the term “fully-developed human being” or if you are worried that the phrase “500 lost lives” in an ethical discussion might confuse the audience into thinking the lost lives were possibly flatworms, or if you feel the problem is that there is no real distinction between two lives–be they zygotes, slugs or fully-developed humans…
Even within a species, there’s some fuzziness… A HeLa colony is unquestionably alive, unquestionably survives on its own without need for active outside support, and can be assigned to no species other than H. sapiens, yet nobody will argue that a HeLa colony deserves any ethical consideration in its own right, any more than a culture of bacteria does.
I never had any problem viewing fetuses as alive and human, and I’m entirely pro-choice.
I’d guess that in any discussion about “life”, first you have to define the scope of that concept as it applies to that discussion, because the word by itself is too fuzzy to be left open except for the most generalized of topics.
Seems to me that one of the most basic characteristics of a living “organism” is that it is able to take materials that are not the same as its own, and tear them apart. Then those basic components are then rearranged back into material that is like the organism itself.
Example: Betty eats some rice, beans, and fish. She tears them apart (digestion) and then uses them to make more Betty.
Of course this is only one of the characteristics of life.
Chronos, your Wiki link asserts that an argument can be made that the HeLa cells are a new species. So I’m not certain your argument stands under scrutiny.
One should keep in mind that the meaning of the words “life” and “alive” can vary depending upon context. If we are talking legal contexts, then the question becomes one of when you want to attach certain rights to the “life” in question, or take those rights away. Answering that is going to depend upon your basic, fundamental assumptions about what a “human” is, and what exactly you are protecting. If you can’t agree on the underlying premises, you won’t agree on the determinations about rights.
OK, even if HeLa cells are a new species (as usual, nature is much more messy than our models of it), they’re still extremely closely related to us, far more so than even chimpanzees. We have standards that apply to how we can treat chimps, and even things like dogs, cats, and birds, based largely on their similarity to us. Should a HeLa colony be accorded greater consideration than a chimpanzee?
It can even be completely unknown, especially if it is extra-terrestrial. Seth Shostak, currently the Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute, wrote in 2002:
But what, exactly, is a sign of life? Or more precisely, an unmistakable sign of life? This sounds like a tedious, trivial question, but a quick dip into your high school biology text will show that it’s not. Defining life in a way that’s both complete and exclusive is not only hard, it hasn’t been done.
