{"agent_id":"rachels","agent_name":"James Rachels","slug":"biographical-life-vs-biological-life","label":"Biographical life vs biological life: is the moral rule against killing the protection of biological functioning (the traditional sanctity-of-life view) or the protection of *lives* in the biographical sense — the sum of a person's aspirations, decisions, activities, projects, and human relationships — that some humans (Mrs Florian, Quinlan, Baby Jane Doe) do not have and that some non-human animals do?","topic":"Biographical life vs biological life","question":"Is the moral rule against killing the protection of biological functioning (the traditional sanctity-of-life view) or the protection of *lives* in the biographical sense — the sum of a person's aspirations, decisions, activities, projects, and human relationships — that some humans (Mrs Florian, Quinlan, Baby Jane Doe) do not have and that some non-human animals do?","position":"The moral rule against killing protects *lives*, not merely *biological functioning*. Being alive in the biological sense — the state of organismic metabolism, neural activity, basal physiological operation — is relatively unimportant; what matters is *having a life* in the biographical sense, where \"a life\" is the sum of one's aspirations, decisions, activities, projects, and human relationships. Mrs Florian, the Alzheimer's patient who has lost all semblance of human personality and whose vocabulary has shrunk to the words \"fire\" and \"pain,\" is biologically alive but does not in the relevant sense have a life; her husband Hans Florian's act of ending her biological functioning (the case that opens *The End of Life*) was not the moral wrong the traditional doctrine of the sanctity of life declares it to be. Karen Quinlan in the persistent vegetative state, Baby Jane Doe with congenital impairments severe enough to preclude development of biographical capacities, the Down's-syndrome infant in Anthony Shaw's nursery dying of dehydration and infection because surgery is being withheld — each is a case where biological life persists and biographical life does not, and where the traditional doctrine produces moral conclusions the case-by-case analysis cannot accept. The complement of the thesis is also true: some non-human animals have biographical lives in the relevant sense; killing *them* is morally objectionable for the same reason killing humans with biographical lives is. The thesis displaces the species-membership criterion (the \"innocent humans\" clause of the AMA position) with a criterion that tracks what actually makes life valuable, and applies the criterion consistently across humans and animals.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The moral rule against killing protects *lives*, not merely *biological functioning*.","n":[1]},{"t":"Being alive in the biological sense — the state of organismic metabolism, neural activity, basal physiological operation — is relatively unimportant; what matters is *having a life* in the biographical sense, where \"a life\" is the sum of one's aspirations, decisions, activities, projects, and human relationships.","n":[2,3]}],[{"t":"Mrs Florian, the Alzheimer's patient who has lost all semblance of human personality and whose vocabulary has shrunk to the words \"fire\" and \"pain,\" is biologically alive but does not in the relevant sense have a life; her husband Hans Florian's act of ending her biological functioning (the case that opens *The End of Life*) was not the moral wrong the traditional doctrine of the sanctity of life declares it to be.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Karen Quinlan in the persistent vegetative state, Baby Jane Doe with congenital impairments severe enough to preclude development of biographical capacities, the Down's-syndrome infant in Anthony Shaw's nursery dying of dehydration and infection because surgery is being withheld — each is a case where biological life persists and biographical life does not, and where the traditional doctrine produces moral conclusions the case-by-case analysis cannot accept.","n":[4]}],[{"t":"The complement of the thesis is also true: some non-human animals have biographical lives in the relevant sense; killing *them* is morally objectionable for the same reason killing humans with biographical lives is.","n":[]},{"t":"The thesis displaces the species-membership criterion (the \"innocent humans\" clause of the AMA position) with a criterion that tracks what actually makes life valuable, and applies the criterion consistently across humans and animals.","n":[5]}]],"texts":"Primary works: *The End of Life: Euthanasia and Morality* (Oxford 1986) Introduction (the canonical statement of the distinction), Chapter 3 'Death and Evil' (the concept of a life), Chapter 4 ''Innocent humans'' (the Baby Jane Doe case, subnormal lives, the criterion problem), Chapter 5 'Suicide and euthanasia' (Barney Clark's key, the link between suicide and euthanasia); *Created from Animals* (Oxford 1990) Chapter 4 'How Different are Humans from Other Animals?' and Chapter 5 'Morality without the Idea that Humans are Special' (the moral-individualist version of the same criterion); *Can Ethics Provide Answers?* (1997) Chapter 5 'Killing, Letting Die, and the Value of Life'; *The Legacy of Socrates* (Stuart Rachels ed., 2007) Chapter 4 'The Value of Human Life' and Chapter 5 'Killing and Starving to Death' (the latter explicitly noted by Stuart as overlapping with *End of Life*). Reception: the traditional sanctity-of-life Christian tradition Rachels engages (Paul Ramsey, the Catholic moral-theology framing); the AMA-style 'innocent humans' criterion that Chapter 4 directly attacks; the personhood-criterion bioethics literature (Mary Anne Warren, Michael Tooley); Peter Singer's preference-utilitarian counterpart in *Practical Ethics*; the disability-rights critique of the Baby Jane Doe and Tracy Latimer applications; the contemporary debate on persistent vegetative state, advance directives, and end-of-life decision-making.","works":["Primary works: *The End of Life: Euthanasia and Morality* (Oxford 1986) Introduction (the canonical statement of the distinction), Chapter 3 'Death and Evil' (the concept of a life), Chapter 4 ''Innocent humans'' (the Baby Jane Doe case, subnormal lives, the criterion problem), Chapter 5 'Suicide and euthanasia' (Barney Clark's key, the link between suicide and euthanasia)","*Created from Animals* (Oxford 1990) Chapter 4 'How Different are Humans from Other Animals?' and Chapter 5 'Morality without the Idea that Humans are Special' (the moral-individualist version of the same criterion)","*Can Ethics Provide Answers?* (1997) Chapter 5 'Killing, Letting Die, and the Value of Life'","*The Legacy of Socrates* (Stuart Rachels ed., 2007) Chapter 4 'The Value of Human Life' and Chapter 5 'Killing and Starving to Death' (the latter explicitly noted by Stuart as overlapping with *End of Life*)"],"reception":"the traditional sanctity-of-life Christian tradition Rachels engages (Paul Ramsey, the Catholic moral-theology framing); the AMA-style 'innocent humans' criterion that Chapter 4 directly attacks; the personhood-criterion bioethics literature (Mary Anne Warren, Michael Tooley); Peter Singer's preference-utilitarian counterpart in *Practical Ethics*; the disability-rights critique of the Baby Jane Doe and Tracy Latimer applications; the contemporary debate on persistent vegetative state, advance directives, and end-of-life decision-making.","status":"The biographical-life thesis is the criterion that *The End of Life* offers to replace the traditional sanctity-of-life doctrine. It has been engaged by the personhood-criterion tradition in bioethics (Mary Anne Warren, Michael Tooley) which develops adjacent criteria, and by Peter Singer's preference-utilitarian framing in *Practical Ethics* which arrives at similar practical conclusions through a different theoretical apparatus. It has been attacked by the sanctity-of-life Christian tradition (Ramsey, the Catholic moral-theology framing) on grounds that the criterion devalues biological life as such, and by the disability-rights tradition on grounds that it devalues the lives of severely cognitively impaired humans. The position defends the criterion against the sanctity-of-life charge as the displacement of species-membership reasoning the traditional doctrine implicitly relies on, and engages the disability-rights critique on the substantive ground that \"biographical life\" is not the same as \"cognitively typical life\" — the criterion does not require the capacities of the average adult, only that the individual have a life in the relevant sense, which most disabled persons clearly do. The hard cases are acknowledged as hard cases the analytical framework can examine.","era":"1941-2003","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The End of Life - Euthanasia and Morality","page":"pp. 36–37","canonical":"","quote":"The sanctity of life ought to be interpreted as protecting lives in the biographical sense, and not merely life in the biological sense. There is a simple, but I think conclusive, argument for this.","label":"The End of Life - Euthanasia and Morality, pp. 36–37"},{"n":2,"work":"The Legacy of Socrates","page":"pp. 106–107","canonical":"","quote":"Biological events (such as puberty and menopause) are crucial in determining life's stages. Second, biological existence is a condition for biography: if you are not alive, you cannot have a life. Stars, nations, concepts, and errors may have histories, but they do not have lives—unless we invest them anthropomorphically with agency and appropriate psychology.","label":"The Legacy of Socrates, pp. 106–107"},{"n":3,"work":"Can Ethics Provide Answers","page":"pp. 89–90","canonical":"","quote":"The story of a person's life is not just an account of her status as a biological organism. It is the story of her history and character, her aspirations and disappointments, her activities and projects and personal relationships. A person's life, in this sense, includes all that she says and does and thinks.","label":"Can Ethics Provide Answers, pp. 89–90"},{"n":4,"work":"The End of Life - Euthanasia and Morality","page":"pp. 15–16","canonical":"","quote":"If the traditional theory is not true, then in our society many decisions concerning life and death are being made on unsound grounds, and the law concerning such matters is badly in need of reform. I believe that the traditional view is mistaken at almost every point. The maze of distinctions'on which it is based cannot withstand analysis. Much of this essay is a defence of that judgement.","label":"The End of Life - Euthanasia and Morality, pp. 15–16"},{"n":5,"work":"Can Ethics Provide Answers","page":"pp. 87–88","canonical":"","quote":"Diane rejected this possibility, saying that she wanted to live a normal life for as long as possible and then Kill herself when her condition became intolerable. She did some research, discovered what drugs she would need, and asked her physician to prescribe them. Dr. Quill prescribed the drugs, eventually Diane used them, and as a result she died. Dr.","label":"Can Ethics Provide Answers, pp. 87–88"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"active-and-passive-euthanasia","label":"Active and passive euthanasia: is there a morally significant difference between killing a patient and letting a patient die, or is the *Equivalence Thesis* — that if passive euthanasia is sometimes permissible, active euthanasia must sometimes be permissible too — the precise conclusion the *Bare Difference Argument* establishes against the AMA's 1973 doctrinal distinction?"},{"slug":"moral-individualism-and-the-critique-of-speciesism","label":"Moral individualism and the critique of speciesism: does the bare fact that one is a member of the human species entitle one to special moral consideration, or does *moral individualism* — the position that how an individual should be treated depends on his or her own particular characteristics rather than on group-membership — replace the discredited doctrine of human dignity once Darwinism has removed its metaphysical supports?"},{"slug":"cultural-relativism","label":"Cultural relativism: does the existence of moral disagreement across cultures entail that there is no objective moral truth, or is the *Cultural Differences Argument* invalid — with the apparent disagreement masking shared underlying values that any functioning culture must hold?"},{"slug":"ethical-egoism","label":"Ethical egoism: do the *Two Arguments Against Ethical Egoism* in *Elements* Chapter 5 and *Legacy of Socrates* Chapter 10 successfully refute the position that one ought always to act in one's own self-interest, given that the documented late-life qualification (Stuart's *Legacy* preface: in the 1990s Jim said he had lost confidence in the argument because he had changed his mind about the role of intuitions in moral theory) is treated as authorship-internal tension rather than retraction?"}]}