Human Dignity and Bioethics

Defending Human Dignity | 323
Immediately after the Flood, primordial law and justice are instituted,
and nascent civil society is founded.
At the forefront of the new order is a newly articulated respect
for human life,* expressed in the announcement of the punishment
for homicide:
Whoever sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be
shed; for in the image of God was man made (9:6).
In this cardinal law, combining speech and force, the threat of capital
punishment stands as a deterrent to murder and provides a motive
for obedience. But the measure of the punishment is instructive. By
equating a life for a life—no more than a life for a life, and the life only
of the murderer, not also, for example, of his wife and children—the
threatened punishment implicitly teaches the equal worth of each
human life. Such equality can be grounded only in the equal humanity
of each human being. Against our own native self-preference, and
against our tendency to overvalue what is our own, blood-for-blood
conveys the message of universality and equality.
But murder is to be avoided not only to avoid the punishment.
That may be a motive, which speaks to our fears; but there is also a
reason, which speaks to our minds and our loftier sentiments. The
deep reason that makes murder wrong—and that even justifies punishing
it homicidally!—is man’s divine-like status. † Any man’s very
being requires that we respect his life. Human life is to be respected
more than animal life—Why?—because man is more than an animal;
* This respect for human life, and the self-conscious establishment of society on
this premise, separates human beings from the rest of the animals. This separation
is made emphatic by the institution of meat-eating (9:1-4), permitted to men here
for the first time. (One can, I believe, show that the permission to eat meat is a
concession to human blood lust and voracity, not something cheerfully and happily
endorsed.) Yet, curiously, even animal life must be treated with respect: the
blood, which is identified as the life, cannot be eaten. Human life, as we shall see
more clearly, is thus both continuous and discontinuous with animal life.
† The second part of verse 9:6 seems to make two points: man is in the image of God
(that is, man is god-like), and man was made thus by God. The decisive point is the
first. Man’s creatureliness cannot be the reason for avoiding bloodshed; the animals
too were made by God, yet permission to kill them for food has just been given. The
full weight rests on man’s being “in the image of God,” on man’s god-like-ness.