The sanctity of life as a sacred value

Abstract

The doctrine of the sanctity of life has traditionally been characterised as a Judeo‐Christian doctrine that has it that bodily human life is an intrinsic good and that it is always impermissible to kill an innocent human. Abortion and euthanasia are often assumed to violate the doctrine. The doctrine is usually understood as being derived from religious dogma and, as such, not amenable to debate. I show that this characterisation of the doctrine is problematic in a number of ways, and I go on to rethink the doctrine. In doing so I follow in the footsteps of Ronald Dworkin, who offered a characterisation of the doctrine in his 1993 Life's Dominion, drawing on a conceptualisation of sacredness that is radically different from standard ones and not dependent on religious dogma. I'll argue that although Dworkin's efforts have much to recommend, his conceptualisation of sacredness is inadequate. Dworkin attempted to reconceptualise sacredness ‘from the armchair’. Here I explain how sacred values are thought of in anthropology and psychology and argue that the sanctity of human life should be understood in the same way. I'll explain how doing so allows us to resolve a number of conceptual problems that bedevil standard characterisations of the doctrine of the sanctity of life. I'll also consider the possibility of a compromise over the sanctity of human life, and as a consequence, compromise over the permissibility of abortion and euthanasia. I'll argue that such compromise is possible, albeit difficult to achieve.

1. THE SANCTITY OF LIFE

The doctrine of the sanctity of life plays a major role in public life. It is routinely appealed to by opponents of abortion, and euthanasia. It is also said to be embedded in law, underpinning legal prohibitions on sacrificing the lives of some people to benefit others. With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, by the U.S. Supreme Court, in June 2022, controversies about the sanctity of life have returned to the forefront of public debates. Here my concern is to elucidate the doctrine, understand why it has played and continues to play such a prominent role in public life, and determine whether or not it allows scope for differing views in debates about abortion and euthanasia.

The doctrine has traditionally been characterised as the view that bodily human life is an intrinsic good, of irreducible value and that, as a consequence, it is always impermissible to kill an innocent human.¹ The doctrine is often described as a Judeo‐Christian one, with theological underpinnings.² Human life is said by Christian and Jewish theologians to be sacred because the Bible describes humans as being made in God's image (the ‘Imago Dei’)³ and also because it depicts human life as a gift from God.⁴ The doctrine is routinely appealed to by conservative Christian opponents of abortion and euthanasia, who construe these acts as violations of it. Influential secular proponents of abortion and euthanasia, such as Peter Singer and Helga Kuhse, agree that abortion and euthanasia violate the doctrine and point to its theological roots to argue that it is ill‐suited to serve as a basis for healthcare policy in contemporary Western liberal pluralist societies.⁵ People who are not Jews or Christians, or who are, but do not interpret their religious beliefs as being incompatible with abortion or euthanasia, should not have to follow laws restricting these practices, designed by and for those who accept the doctrine of the sanctity of life, or so Kuhse and Singer both argue.

The aforementioned formulation of the doctrine of the sanctity of life is problematic in several respects. The first is that while it tracks a key fault line in academic debates about abortions and euthanasia, it fails to track a similar fault line in the public debate about these topics, which plays out very differently than the academic one. Leading academic proponents of abortion and euthanasia, including Kuhse⁶ and Singer,⁷ deny that human life is an intrinsic good. However, many nonacademic proponents of abortion and euthanasia appear to regard human life, including the life of foetuses, as an intrinsic good and sometimes describe human life as sacred.⁸ Public debates about abortion and euthanasia are not principally debates about whether human life, including the lives of foetuses, is an intrinsic good, of irreducible value, and can be legitimately referred to as sacred. Rather, they are debates between disputants who share an assumption that human life is an intrinsic good but who disagree about whether or not the value of this good should sometimes be overridden by other considerations.

The second problem is that the stipulation that innocent human life is sanctified is not easy to understand. Surely the lives of the noninnocent are as much a gift from God and as much made in God's image as are the lives of the innocent. So, it looks like both innocent and noninnocent lives should be protected by the doctrine of the sanctity of life, and that, therefore, proponents of the doctrine should oppose taking human life under all circumstances. But many actual proponents of the doctrine, especially fundamentalist Christian ones, also advocate the death penalty for some of the noninnocent.⁹ If the doctrine only provides protection from killing for the innocent, then we are owed an explanation as to why.¹⁰

A third issue is that the doctrine of the sanctity of life seems very similar to doctrines about the intrinsic value of life found in other religious traditions, including Jainism,¹¹ Islam,¹² Hinduism and Buddhism.¹³ There are also secular defences of the doctrine.¹⁴ The fact that the doctrine does not appear to be distinctive of the Judeo‐Christian tradition does nothing to undermine its credibility as a Christian and Jewish theological doctrine. However, the sheer range of traditions in which the doctrine or some close approximation to it occurs strongly suggests that it has conceptual roots that extend beyond the doctrines of particular religious traditions and are located in some broader feature or features of the human condition.

A fourth concern is that many proponents of the doctrine of the sanctity of life behave in ways that suggest that they regard this doctrine differently from many other theological doctrines they also accept. These days it is rare, at least in Western liberal pluralist countries, for the religious to demand that people who do not follow their particular religion abide by all its strictures. The Quran explicitly forbids the consumption of pork, but Muslims, in most countries, appear to have little or no interest in trying to prevent non‐Muslims from eating pork. Jehovah's Witnesses interpret the Bible as forbidding them from having blood transfusions. However, Jehovah's Witnesses appear uninterested in trying to prevent non‐Jehovah's Witnesses from having blood transfusions. Many religious doctrines are regarded, at least in contemporary Western liberal societies, as applying only to followers of a particular religion. In stark contrast, however, most religious opponents of abortion and euthanasia, who regard themselves as opposing these practices because their religion tells them that life is sacred, appear highly invested in trying to change laws and practices in order to prevent anyone and everyone from conducting abortions and euthanasia. Although they regard their acceptance of the doctrine of the sanctity of life as grounded in theology, they also regard the doctrine as applying to people who do not accept their theological presuppositions. It would be good to be able to explain why.

I'm not the first person to notice any of these problematic features of the doctrine of the sanctity of life and to note the ways in which they cast doubt on standard characterisations of the doctrine. Various explanations can and have been offered for each of them individually. In what follows I will offer a new characterisation of the doctrine of the sanctity of life which provides a unified explanation for all of them. It will involve focussing on and thinking carefully about what it is for life, or anything else, to be sacred. I'm not the first person to attempt such a project either. In his Life's Dominion Ronald Dworkin urged a wholesale rethinking of the very idea of the sanctity of life.¹⁵ My approach is inspired by his but is also quite different from it. In the next section, I'll briefly consider Dworkin's attempt to rethink the doctrine of the sanctity of life and point out where it falls down. In the following section I will sketch a scientifically informed approach to sacred values; and in the section that follows I'll apply it to the doctrine and then account for its problematic features, which were identified earlier. In the section after that, I'll consider the prospects for finding a compromise over the sanctity of life and will then apply my findings to the prospects for compromise in contemporary debates about the permissibility of abortion and euthanasia. The final section of the paper contains a concluding remark and a response to a not uncommon line of criticism of my approach.

2. LIFE'S DOMINION

Dworkin breaks from most philosophers commenting on the doctrine of the sanctity of life, who construe the doctrine as primarily a theological one. He depicts the view that human life is sacred as a background assumption shared by almost all of us, including the advocates of abortion and euthanasia, and not dependent on any theological justification.¹⁶ According to Dworkin, what ‘… actually divides people’, in disputes about the morality of abortion (as well as euthanasia) is a ‘disagreement about how best to respect a fundamental idea we almost all share in some form: that individual human life is sacred’.¹⁷ He understands sacredness to be a form of intrinsic, rather than instrumental value. However, he informs us, we value sacredness in a different way from other forms of intrinsic value. We do not feel the need to create as much human life as possible.¹⁸ The sacred is valuable only when it exists. Dworkin tells us that ‘It is not important that there be more people. But once a human life has begun, it is very important that it flourish and not be wasted’.¹⁹ He thinks the same is true of works of art, some of which he considers to be sacred.²⁰

If Dworkin is to be believed, almost all of us recognise two sources of intrinsic value in human life. These are ‘natural investment’ and ‘creative investment’ in human life.²¹ People disagree about the relative importance of these two sources of intrinsic value, and this disagreement allows scope for those who share the same basic idea of sacredness to disagree about the morality of abortion (and euthanasia). People who decide that the value of natural investment in human life clearly outweighs the value of creative investment will generally be opposed to abortion, as abortion involves the destruction of natural investment in human life. However, for those who think that the creative investment in human life makes a significant contribution to the intrinsic value of human life things are not cut and dried.

The birth of a child may lead to a reduction in the value of creative investment in a woman's life if her life plans are frustrated by the demands of child rearing. Also, a woman may decide that at a given stage in her life she will be unable to provide a child with a flourishing life. She may decide that the life of a child she could choose to have, at a particular time, would, most likely, have low levels of intrinsic value. Such a child would have a deficient upbringing leading it to be unable to realise satisfying life plans. For these reasons a woman may decide that the overall diminution in the creative value of her life, that results from having a child at a particular time, would not be outweighed by the increase in overall natural and creative value that could result from her bringing a child into existence. When she makes this decision, she chooses to have an abortion on the basis of consideration of the sanctity of life, according to Dworkin.²²

Dworkin holds that people who are not religious can experience the sacred. As we have seen, he considers that works of art can be sacred, and he considers that these can include ones that express nonreligious themes. He also points out that in many countries there are people who consider their national flag, and sometimes other symbols of their nation to be sacred.²³

Life's Dominion was much discussed when it was published in 1993, but Dworkin's account of the sanctity of life came to be regarded as problematic by many. One concern about Dworkin's account of the sanctity of life is that it involves the assumption that human lives can become more sacred over time as more ‘creative investment’ is made in them. This seems to fly in the face of standard contemporary treatments of the sanctity of life, which have it that all human lives are equally sacred.²⁴ Another problem is with Dworkin's account of ‘natural investment’. According to him, the religious equate natural investment with ‘divine investment’ and the secular suppose that the natural processes of creation somehow imbue human life with sacred value. As McMahan points out, Dworkin fails to cite any religious thinkers who characterise the sanctity of life in terms of divine investment.²⁵ The mainstream Judeo‐Christian view is that human life is sacred just because God decrees that it is sacred and not because God somehow invests in human life.²⁶ If God were to suddenly decree that rocks are sacred, then rocks would become sacred, regardless of whether or not God had made a ‘divine investment' in rocks.²⁷ The idea that significantly many nonreligious people suppose that natural processes imbue human life with sacred value is also hard to accept. It appears to presume that they fundamentally misunderstand the natural process of evolution, attributing the ability to create nonnatural emergent properties to it.²⁸

Dworkin's treatment of the sanctity of life, and of the sacred more generally, in Life's Dominion, captures the near universality of the view that life is somehow sacred but seems not to do justice to ordinary talk of sanctity of life and the sacred. This should not be altogether surprising. He approaches the topic ‘from the armchair’ and does not avail himself of the considerable resources of scientific work on sacred values due, inter alia, to anthropologists and psychologists.

3. SACRED VALUES

Almost all religions designate particular places, people, items and actions as sacred or holy (I'll use these terms interchangeably). There are sacred texts, such as the Bible, sacred places such as Mecca, sacred buildings, such as churches, holy relics, sacred rituals and holy people. Also, as Dworkin rightly points out, it is not only the religious who apply the term ‘sacred’.²⁹ There are national symbols, such as flags, places of national significance, including battlefields, and also buildings, such as war memorials, that have come to be regarded by many as sacred.³⁰ Human life itself is often claimed to be sacred. When people make this last claim, are they using the term ‘sacred' in the same sense as in the other examples? To determine whether they are or are not we first need to acquire a deeper appreciation of sacredness, informed by relevant scientific work.

Contemporary scientific discussion of the sacred starts with Durkheim and rejects the idea shared by the traditional account and by Dworkin that sacred values are somehow intrinsic. In his classic 1912 work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim treats the distinction between the sacred and the profane as the central distinction around which all religious thought is organised.³¹ He understands sacred people, places, buildings and objects as supposed points of contact between the ordinary natural world and the divine and he holds that the proper religious attitude towards the sacred is one of reverence. He further holds that the religious demonstrate this proper attitude by setting up and respecting rules regulating and restricting contact with the sacred. The religious recognise that there is an inherent danger in contact with the sacred, according to Durkheim, because the sacred is mysterious and potentially harmful to those who treat it in inappropriate ways.³²

According to Durkheim, the sacred plays the functional role of creating social cohesion in religious communities.³³ When members of communities who share a reverence for the same sacred values and items conduct rituals involving those values and items, they are able to experience a shared emotion that Durkheim refers to as ‘collective effervescence’.³⁴ Participation in rituals that lead to the experience of collective effervescence can be an effective means of bonding communities together.³⁵ All religions conduct rituals. These can involve prayer, song, chants and dance, along with a range of other collective actions that can be combined into elaborate ceremonies. Such religious rituals are focussed on shared sacred values and/or items.³⁶

Why do people regard some values as sacred and not others? Sacred values are sustained by two sources. One is the aforementioned rituals focused on shared sacred values. The other is conceptual schemes that involve sacred values. a tract of holy land can come to be regarded as sacred by a particular people because their religious texts tell them that it is granted to them by a supernatural being and must be treated in particular ways. The area around Mecca and Medina—the Hijaz—is regarded by devout Muslims as forbidden to non‐Muslims because the Prophet Muhammad is said to have uttered the words ‘let there not be two religions in Arabia’, leading to the eviction of Christian and Jewish communities from the area in 641 A.D.³⁷ National flags can come to be regarded as sacred when individuals start to regard their nation as having a transcendental mission and begin to think of their flag as symbolising something greater than themselves that they participate in.

Durkheim's characterisation of religion and his account of the sacred has been enormously influential in the sociology of religion.³⁸ Durkheim's ideas about religion have also become very influential in moral psychology and the psychology of religion. Indeed, Jon Haidt, one of the leading figures in contemporary moral psychology, describes the account of religion he favours as ‘straight out of Durkheim’.³⁹

Contemporary psychological accounts of the sacred share Durkheim's rejection of sacred values as somehow intrinsic and his insistence on the importance of the regulation and separation of the sacred from the nonsacred, in so far as this can be achieved, for the understanding of sacred values. Tetlock defines sacred values as ‘… those values that a moral community treats as possessing transcendental significance that precludes comparisons, trade‐offs, or indeed any mingling with secular values’.⁴⁰ While the general thrust of rules governing the sacred serves to regulate its interaction with the nonsacred, this does not mean that these rules are simple and it does not mean that everyone is expected to obey exactly the same rules. Religious organisations, as well as other organisations that hold sacred values, will typically set up office bearers charged with upholding particular duties, in regard to the sacred. Consider an ordinary church—a paradigmatically sacred building. The rules and norms governing the behaviour of a priest in a church are different from the rules and norms governing the behaviour of a parishioner. Rules and norms governing the behaviour of curates, altar boys and choristers are different again.

Sacred values were treated with some skepticism in mainstream psychology for a long time, due to the influence of the rational actor model of human behaviour which suggests that it is never in anyone's interest to refuse even to consider the possibility of compromising particular values. No matter how important some value may seem, there is always the possibility that someone will offer you sufficient quantities of something else that you value to make it in your interest to consider compromising those values, or so an influential line of reasoning goes. However, there is mounting evidence that when people think of particular values as sacred, they really do refuse to compromise on them, even when it is in their interests to do so.⁴¹

Any attempt to treat sacred values as if they are not sacred is liable to lead to strong, adverse emotional reactions, especially if these involve the outright violation of rules regarding the proper treatment of the sacred. The former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a religious Zionist, Yigal Amir, in 1995. Amir was outraged that Rabin was seeking a peace deal with an interim Palestinian authority involving Israel ceding control of parts of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to that authority. Amir was unconcerned about whether this was a good deal for Israel, or whether it might help secure long‐term peace in the Middle East. Amir regarded the land set to be ceded as part of sacred territory granted by God to the Jewish people in a holy covenant. He considered that the proposal to cede that territory to non‐Jews was a clear breach of God's covenant, which justified Rabin's assassination.⁴² The deliberate flouting of rules regarding proper behaviour in sacred buildings, towards holy texts, and towards sacred emblems, is also liable to lead to expressions of outrage and punitive responses aimed at ensuring that such violations are never repeated.⁴³

A set of studies by Ginges et al. illustrates the difficulty of obtaining compromises with those who hold sacred values.⁴⁴ Some of Ginges et al.'s subjects were Palestinian students who were invited to consider a ‘two‐state solution’ peace deal, involving a future Palestinian government relinquishing claims to sovereignty over East Jerusalem. Another group of students were asked to consider a variant of the same deal with an added ‘sweetener’. The sweetener was that Israel would pay each Palestinian family US$1000 a year over a 10‐year period. Amongst the majority of the research subjects who were devout Muslims the offer of the sweetened deal backfired. Jerusalem (Al‐Quds) is considered a holy city in Islam. The suggestion that they might be willing to abandon their religious duty to administer an Islamic holy city in return for material reward infuriated devout Palestinian Muslims, making them even less likely to support the peace deal than they would have been otherwise.⁴⁵

4. IS THE SANCTITY OF LIFE A SACRED VALUE?

Is the sanctity of human life sufficiently similar to other sacred values to warrant analysing it in the same way as those others? There are at least four striking points of similarity. First, we humans conduct many rituals specifically dedicated to celebrating human life itself. Most religious traditions conduct rituals celebrating the creation of life—birth. Christians celebrate a birth and commit to raising a newborn as a Christian in a Christening ceremony. Sikhs visit their temple as soon as possible after a birth to conduct a religious naming ceremony and Jews celebrate the birth of male infants with a circumcision ceremony that takes place when they are 8 days old. Other rituals are dedicated to marking the passage of human life, such as birthdays, and ceremonies marking the commencement of adulthood such as Bar and Bat Mitzvah ceremonies in the Jewish tradition. There are also funeral rituals marking the end of life in many religious traditions. Second, religions draw clear conceptual connections between human life and something greater that human life is part of. As has already been noted the Bible connects human life to the divine via the notion of giftedness and via the Imago Dei. There is also a strand of ‘humanist’ thought, associated initially with Petrarch (1304–1374), that seems concerned to defend a view of humanity as somehow transcending the limits imposed on other worldly beings as a result of the awe‐inspiring power of human rationality and creativity. Humanists in this tradition are able to sacralise human life without accepting a religion. Third, people who accept the sanctity of human life are typically unwilling to compromise this value, regardless of what is on offer. Like other sacred values, a sanctified life is regarded as untradeable. Fourth, there are strong emotions attached to debates about the sanctity of life. Many of the people who regard abortion as a violation of the sanctity of life do not merely disapprove of abortion. They are outraged by abortion. This fury can and does lead to raucous demonstrations and violent actions including the murder of abortion‐providing physicians.⁴⁶ Given that the sanctity of human life is similar to other sacred values in at least the four aforementioned ways, there is a strong case for analysing it in the same way as other sacred values.

Let us now return to consider the first four problems with the sanctity of life doctrine that we started with. The first was that public debates about abortion and euthanasia are often between disputants who share the view that human life is sacred, and it was difficult to understand how someone could believe that life was sacred and also be in favour of abortion and/or euthanasia. If we draw on the scientific literature on sacred values, we can address this problem. There are some people who regard human life as becoming sacred at birth rather than at conception, so for them, abortion involves no violation of sacred values. Given that human societies tend to conduct rituals about birth, and do not usually conduct rituals about conception, it is easy to see why many people might come to suppose that life becomes sacred at birth rather than conception.

Disagreements about the permissibility of euthanasia amongst those who share the view that life is sacred need to be explained in a different manner. People who believe that life is sacred accept rules governing the proper treatment of human lives including one's own. These are typically rules developed by and within a tradition. It is usual for such rules to permit killing under some circumstances, such as when it is unavoidable during acts of self‐defense. Those who believe that life is sacred and also hold that it is permissible for people to terminate their own lives under some circumstances believe that the rules governing the proper treatment of a sacred human life are not violated when people kill themselves under those circumstances. Some early Christian theologians, such as Justin Martyr (345–419), accepted that human life is sacred and also argued that suicide was permissible under some circumstances. It was not until the ideas of Augustine gained ascendancy in Christian theology that the view that suicide is absolutely prohibited became Christian orthodoxy.⁴⁷

The second problem was to explain why many people who regard life as sacred also regard it as permissible to terminate the lives of particular classes of noninnocent people, such as convicted murderers. This is easy to explain when we construe the sanctity of life in the same way as we construe other sacred values. To treat a human life as sacred is not to aim to preserve it under all circumstances. Rather, it is to follow rules regarding the proper treatment of sacred human lives. If those rules involve execution under some circumstances, then it is permissible (or perhaps even obligatory) to execute people under those circumstances, even though this involves the destruction of a sacred being.⁴⁸ An example of such a rule is the Biblical instruction to put murderers to death.⁴⁹ In one sense such rules are arbitrary. A particular tradition could evolve in such a way as to end up endorsing pretty much any rule about the proper treatment of the sacred. In another sense, they are anything but arbitrary. Individuals don't choose the relevant rules. They follow the ones handed down to them by the participants in the tradition that came before them.

The third problem was to explain why so many different religious traditions (and some nonreligious traditions) adhere to doctrines that are similar to the Judeo‐Christian doctrine of the sanctity of life. Given what we know about sacred values this is what we should expect. There are rituals dedicated to celebrating the beginning, passage, and end of human life in many traditions and religions persistently develop conceptual schemes in which human life plays a central role, making human life a highly suitable subject for sacralisation.

The fourth problem was that many religious proponents of the doctrine of the sanctity of life do not appear to treat the doctrine in the same way as they treat other doctrines underwritten by their theology. They are concerned to prevent anyone from violating the sanctity of life but treat many other religious strictures as applying only to followers of their own religion. This phenomenon is explained by noting that the ways in which one demonstrates respect for the sacred varies according to the detail of the particular rules governing the proper treatment of the sacred. Some rules are intended to apply only to believers. The Old Testament makes clear that a rule about not eating pork is a rule that applies only to Jews—‘a people holy to the Lord Your God’.⁵⁰ Other rules are interpreted as applying to all peoples. The Ten Commandments in the Bible, which include a stipulation against murder, are not merely supposed by Christians to be rules governing the proper conduct of Jewish people. Rather, they are supposed to be rules governing the proper conduct of all people. God is supposed, by Christians, to have provided these to Moses with the intention that they be disseminated to everybody, first by the Jewish people and then by Christians.

5. NEGOTIATION OVER THE SACRED

Given that by definition sacred values are values that people do not trade‐off, it might seem impossible to negotiate over them. However, the boundaries of the sacred are often vague and an awareness of where this vagueness lies opens up the possibility of indirect negotiation via ‘reframing’.⁵¹ Jerusalem (Al‐Quds) is a holy city for both Jews and Muslims, and members of both groups regard it as their religious duty to administer it on behalf of God. It might seem impossible for both religions to control Jerusalem. However, the boundaries of Jerusalem are vague. If Jews were to construe Jerusalem as West Jerusalem and Muslims were to construe Al‐Quds as East Jerusalem then a lasting compromise could be achieved without violating anyone's sacred values.⁵²

Even the most doctrinaire groups who subscribe to sacred values have been known to reframe those values to suit their circumstances. In March 2001 the notoriously extreme Islamist group the Taliban dynamited and destroyed the Bamiyan statues—two giant, ancient Buddhist statues located in the Bamiyan valley in Afghanistan. They did this because hard‐line Islamists within the Taliban viewed the statues as an attempt to represent God—an act that they considered sacrilegious. However, in 1999, Mullah Omar, the somewhat pragmatic, highly devout leader of the Taliban, had decided to preserve, rather than destroy, the Bamiyan statues. At the time he was able to persuade other members of the Taliban leadership that the Bamiyan statues were not sacrilegious as there were no Buddhists remaining in Afghanistan to worship them, and so, there was no one to regard them as attempts to represent God.⁵³

Is there scope to reframe views about the sanctity of life? Yes, there is. As we have seen there is room for differences of opinion over the rules that one must follow to uphold the sanctity of life. Also, there is room for differences of opinion about when human life becomes sacred. The prevailing Christian position these days is that human life becomes sacred at conception. However, a traditional view, endorsed by both Augustine and Aquinas, has it that human life does not become sacred until ensoulment occurs. This was understood to occur at the time of ‘quickening’—4–5 months after conception.⁵⁴ Aquinas understood a pre‐ensoulment abortion to be wrongful, but he did not understand it as nearly as wrongful as the abortion of a post‐ensoulment foetus, which he regarded as a homicidal act.⁵⁵

Given the scope for flexibility over when human life becomes sacred and over what is involved in respecting the sanctity of life, there is room for negotiation over the sanctity of life via reframing. However, this is not currently a promising route to the resolution of debates over the morality of abortion and euthanasia. Sacred values are only creatively reinterpreted and reframed for the sake of compromise, by participants in a dispute, when there are substantive benefits for them that would result from compromise. The Taliban leadership was briefly motivated to creatively reinterpret their sacred values and refrain from destroying the Bamiyan statues because for a time, during the earlier period in which they ruled Afghanistan (1996–2001), they saw the statues as a major inducement to tourists to visit Afghanistan, and they valued tourist income. The Taliban also refused numerous lucrative offers made to buy the statues and relocate them outside Afghanistan.⁵⁶ They could not accept such offers, as doing so would involve them demonstrating disrespect for their own sacred values, by directly compromising these for material reward.

The view that human life is sacred from the moment of conception is standard amongst contemporary advocates of the ‘pro‐life’ position about abortion.⁵⁷ It would involve no great conceptual difficulties for pro‐lifers to reframe their values and construe human life as becoming sacred at another point in the developmental process. However, it is not easy to see how and why pro‐lifers would become motivated to creatively reinterpret and reframe their sacred values for the sake of compromise, bearing in mind that offers of material reward for such creative reinterpretation are liable to backfire as acceptance would involve pro‐lifers demonstrating disrespect for their own sacred values. Even if the mainstream pro‐life movement were to somehow become motivated to creatively reinterpret and reframe their values, for the sake of compromise, there would almost certainly remain hard‐liners who would not go along with any proposed compromise. It is sometimes possible to find compromises over sacred values, but the route to compromise is difficult to navigate and unfortunately, there is no great reason to believe that participants in contemporary debates about the permissibility of abortion will navigate it any time soon.⁵⁸

Similar difficulties arise when we consider the prospects of opponents of euthanasia, who regard euthanasia as violating the doctrine of the sanctity of life, being motivated to reframe their values for the sake of compromise. Many Christians object to euthanasia because they regard it as amounting to assisted suicide and they regard suicide as violating a rule governing the proper treatment of human life which, for them, is sacred. It is entirely possible to reframe this value and accept different rules governing the proper treatment of human life. Indeed, as we saw there were some early Christians, such as Justin Martyr, who advocated suicide under some circumstances. However, it is hard to see how and why contemporary Christian opponents of euthanasia would become motivated to reframe this value.

6. CONCLUDING REMARK

I have articulated a different approach to the doctrine of the sanctity of life than most philosophers and bioethicists who have addressed the topic, and it should be appreciated that I have a different purpose in mind than most of them. Like Dworkin, but unlike most philosophers and bioethicists, my primary concern is to understand the role a doctrine that has widespread and persistent popular appeal plays in public debate. I am neither concerned to justify the doctrine of the sanctity of life nor to find some other logical flaw with it. It is an omnipresent feature of human life that we experience sacredness in the world. We experience places of worship, flags and revered texts as sacred, and in the same way, we experience human life as sacred. Sacred values are not going to go away any time soon and it is important that we try to understand how and to what extent they influence ordinary thinking. As we have seen a sense of human life as sacred can make some people feel that abortion and euthanasia are obviously wrongful while others have no difficulty reconciling abortion and euthanasia with a sense that life is sacred. People cannot usually be argued out of the way they happen to construe the sanctity of life, but sacred values do have the potential to be shifted via reframing.

Let me close by addressing a line of criticism of my Durkheimian approach to the sanctity of life that is sometimes made by philosophers and bioethicists who favour a more traditional analytic approach to the subject. It may seem that Durkheim and I are simply ignoring religious belief and failing to understand religion from the point of view of those who participate in religious groups and rituals because they are motivated to do so by religious belief.⁵⁹ I don't wish to deny that there may be a few people, particularly theologians, who decide to participate in religious groups and rituals after carefully considering their religious convictions. But the vast majority of religious adherents don't come to participate in religious groups and rituals this way. Most people are born into a religious community and start out participating in religious rituals because their religious community introduces them to its rituals and makes it clear that they are expected to participate. Participation causes them to experience a shared sense of sacred values and of community bondedness. Religious beliefs give shape to this shared sense of sacred values and are in turn shaped by it. The view of participation in religious groups and rituals as being straightforwardly derived from religious belief is misleading in most cases. Religious belief is deeply intertwined with ritual participation and with the sacred values shared by a religious group.^{60 , 61}

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The author declares no conflict of interest.

Biography

Steve Clarke is a professor of Philosophy in the School of Social Work and Arts, as well as a senior research associate of the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, and the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Recent publications include Clarke, S. (2020). Huckleberry Finn's conscience: Reckoning with the evasion. Journal of Ethics, 24(4), 485–508, and Clarke, S., Zohny, H., & Savulescu, J. (Eds.) (2021). Rethinking moral status. Oxford University Press.

Clarke, S. (2023). The sanctity of life as a sacred value. Bioethics, 37, 32–39. 10.1111/bioe.13094