Life
Human life is the embodied existence of a being whose nature includes the capacities for reason and moral judgment.
Human life is not identical to the mere presence of a human body.
A corpse is the bodily remains of a human being, but it is no longer a living human being. Life is gone. What has ceased is the living unity of body and soul that constituted the embodied human person.
Classical philosophy expressed this distinction through the idea of body and soul. Aristotle understood the soul not simply as a ghost inhabiting a body, but as the principle by which a living body is actually alive. A living human being is therefore an embodied being-a living unity of body and soul.
This is one reason the word embodied matters in our definition. Human life is neither merely matter nor merely mind. It is the embodied existence of a particular kind of living being whose nature includes intellectual and moral capacities distinctive of human beings.
Reason, Speech, and Logos
Classical thinkers often used the Greek word logos to describe a distinctively human capacity that includes reason, articulate speech, argument, and the ability to give an account of things.
Human beings do not merely perceive particular objects. We can abstract from particulars and form general concepts.
After encountering many individual trees, for example, the mind can grasp the general category “tree.” The common noun does not refer only to this particular tree or that particular tree. It identifies what many particular trees have in common—the intelligible form, or idea, by which we recognize them as trees.
This movement from particulars to universals is one of the foundations of articulate human speech and rational thought.
Human beings can therefore speak not only about particular courageous actions but about courage; not merely particular just actions but justice; not only particular free choices but the general concept of liberty.
This capacity for abstraction also makes moral and political philosophy possible.
Human beings can ask not merely what is pleasant or painful, but what is good or bad, right or wrong, just or unjust, noble or base. We can give reasons for our judgments, examine those reasons, argue about them with others, and reconsider them.
In this sense, reason, articulate speech, and moral judgment belong together within the classical understanding of logos.
Life and Property
To explain what human life is, however, is not yet to explain the natural right each person possesses to his own life.
John Locke provides an important bridge. In his Second Treatise of Government, Locke famously writes: “every man has a property in his own person; this nobody has any right to but himself.”
That does not mean a person’s life is the same kind of property as a house. A house is something a person owns. His life is the embodied existence of the house owner himself.
A house can be sold, transferred, abandoned, or destroyed while its owner continues to exist. One’s life is different. Everything else a person possesses, chooses, creates, enjoys, or pursues presupposes his continued existence as a living human being.
Locke’s language nevertheless points toward a comprehensive understanding of property. No other human being rightfully owns you. Your person, faculties, labor, time, and rightful choices are not naturally at the disposal of another person or ruler. You are no other person’s property.
James Madison later made this broad understanding especially clear in his essay “Property.” A person has property not merely in land or material possessions but also in his opinions, religious conscience, faculties, personal liberty, and rights. Madison famously observed that just as a person has a right to his property, he may also be said to have “property in his rights.”
In this broader sense, one’s life is naturally one’s own property.
The Natural Right to Life
The Declaration of Independence identifies “Life” among the “unalienable Rights” possessed by human beings.
The natural right to life means that no other human being possesses an arbitrary natural authority to destroy another person’s living existence. Government does not create this right. According to the Declaration, government is instituted to secure it.
That does not mean that every taking of human life is necessarily unjust. Questions involving self-defense, punishment, war, and other uses of lethal force require moral and legal judgment.
The more fundamental principle is this: No human being naturally belongs to another human being, and no ruler possesses an unlimited authority to dispose of human lives at will.
The natural right to life therefore places a moral limit upon political power.
Life and the Other Natural Rights
Life possesses a kind of priority among natural rights because every exercise of another right presupposes a living person.
- Liberty concerns how a person governs his life.
- Property concerns the faculties, labor, possessions, and resources through which a person sustains and directs his life.
- The pursuit of happiness concerns the ends toward which a person chooses to order his life.
Life is therefore not merely one possession among others. It is the embodied existence of the person to whom all other rights and possessions belong.
Why Life Matters
A free and just political order begins with recognition that human beings do not exist at the pleasure of rulers or other people.
Human life is the embodied existence of a being whose nature includes the capacities for reason and moral judgment. Those capacities make possible articulate speech, choice, responsibility, moral deliberation, friendship, virtue, self-government, and political life.
Each person therefore stands before others not as a thing to be owned, used, or arbitrarily disposed of, but as a being whose life is naturally his own.
The legitimate powers of government are bounded by this principle: government may protect human life and employ force where justice requires it, but it possesses no arbitrary authority over human life.
