We live in a time when around the world so many lives seem not to matter. Whether they be Uighur lives, women’s lives, Black lives, Yemeni lives or refugee lives. So widely disregarded in practice, the large claim that every life has value, however, oftentimes has to be justified. The ultimate reason is that each human being is precious and has an inalienable dignity. No person may be used as a means to another’s end.
Furthermore, human beings depend on one another to come into life and at every stage of life. For that reason we are not isolated individuals but are bound in relationships to one another and to our world. That interconnection at the heart of our humanity explains why our lives matter to others.
Life means more than merely not being dead. It includes our relationships: personal, and those to our ethnic, religious, political and social groups and to the institutions of which we are part. For that reason we can properly speak of Black lives, Catholic lives, Californian lives, Muslim lives and LGBTQ+ lives.
The network of relationships that constitutes each human life suggests that we should consider how each human life matters. This consideration draws attention to the precious humanity of each person and to the concrete relationships that shape their distinctive humanity. It leads us naturally to ask whether the way in which those social and power relationships are structured in society respects the equal humanity of each person or discriminates against it.
If we insist that each human life matters, we should be doubly grateful that people from particular groups in society protest against discrimination that devalues and puts at risk their lives, and insist that the lives of people in their group matter. Black lives, Rohinga lives, Uighur lives, Communist lives, asylum seeker lives and, I would argue, the lives of the unborn are equally precious and equally command respect. Movements that defend them assert that each human life matters.
Why, then, is any defence of human life controversial? One reason may be the tension between the grief and disturbance that we often feel when confronted with death, and the sheer number of people who lose their lives avoidably. People die in war, in avoidable starvation, are executed by governments or mobs, die of neglect, from domestic violence, in road and industrial accidents, in protests. They take their own lives, die as a result of decisions that