The Value of Human Being, Part 2

[1] My brother Dan lives in a waiver home in Muncie, Indiana, with two other people with impairments. Theirs are much more severe than Dan’s, who can’t speak or walk, but who thinks well and understands everything, effectively communicates despite aphasia and partial oral paralysis through manual spelling and gestures, and uses a wheelchair to get around. 

Neither G. nor B. can do any of that. G. sporadically howls but doesn’t speak, although he seems to understand basic directives, like “Time to walk now” (he can’t walk independently, but he can amble across a room if someone half-carries him) and “Have a bite of this” as someone spoons him his meal. He wears a protective helmet to cushion the blows he repetitively delivers to it with his fist. B. doesn’t walk at all, nor does he eat (he is sustained by a nutritional paste delivered through a tube directly into his stomach), and it’s hard to determine his degree of awareness, as he doesn’t engage in conversation but does occasionally repeatedly parrot a word or brief phrase he’s heard said around him (“Pizza!” “Bowling!” “One, two, three!”). Both G. and B., now in their sixties, have lived their entire lives this way. I can’t tell if either of them is aware of his own existence, much less enjoys it. On both counts, I suspect they don’t. 

And yet I know they matter….

[2] It’s a terrible shame, but I’ve really had to dig for reasons these misfortunate men’s lives matter, even though they themselves seem to be unaware that they exist. Maybe because it’s possible they’re more aware than they seem. Maybe because they help us evaluate, and perhaps expand, our own capacity for empathy and compassion. Maybe they help us to clarify the various components of our idea of what it means to be human, to live a human life. Maybe also because they have names, an unmistakable sign that someone, at least at some point, has cared about them—had hopes for them, dreams for them. Maybe because their paid caregivers genuinely do care about them. Maybe all of the above.

I’ve had a difficult struggle with the question of why G.’s and B.’s lives are worthwhile—worth the time, energy, and societal resources they receive. To be clear, I wouldn’t hurt them for the world. I would go to considerable lengths to rescue them if the house was on fire or if they were otherwise in danger. So evidently I feel that they matter. But a solid logical and reasonable explanation for that concern has so far eluded me.

Maybe everything that matters isn’t logical or reasonable.

Philosopher Peter Singer’s point, as publicly maligned as it was and has remained, is entirely logical and reasonable: that the lives of sentient animals are at least as salient as those of humans who are, by all appearances at least, not sentient. His is not (as some have absurdly characterized it as being) an argument to mistreat, slaughter, and eat insentient people. His point, rather, is that sentient animals also should not be mistreated, slaughtered, and eaten.

I’ve gotten a little off-track from where I started—or maybe not. Maybe I’m spot on.

[3] In a recent church service, a guest minister helped me answer the question of why G. and B. matter. He interwove the first and seventh Unitarian Universalist (UU) principles as a means of examining the connections between UUism and Buddhism. The first UU principle affirms “the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” My problem with applying that principle is the definition of the word person; the term seems to apply to G. and B. genomically, but I don’t detect personhood in them (not forgetting for a moment that the concept of personhood is both contested and slippery, and also that I don’t see or know everything). However, the seventh principle—long my favorite, as I believe it encompasses so many other principles and ethical and behavioral guidelines within it—invokes “respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”

We are each of us enmeshed in the web of existence. This web provides the basis of the “butterfly effect”: what affects one part of the web, however minutely, affects the others, even if we can’t perceive it. G. and B. are certainly nodes in that web. Their belonging to and within the whole is likely what underpins my instinctual respect for them: my bone-deep conviction that their lives matter, even if I can’t pinpoint exactly how they connect to the rest of the world. Whatever else they are, or are not, G. and B. are part of the web of existence of which we are all a part.

And that is enough.