"The Sacredness of Human Life"

Along the course of any little writing project, one may come across thought-provoking material that does not necessarily fit within the scope of the project itself.  That has certainly happened to me  lately.  My project has been in part to understand Sir James Fitzjames Stephen's ideas about criminal punishment.  Stephen was a towering figure in late-Victorian criminal law as well as the law of evidence, and a powerful political writer as well. 

Here he is on a subject near and dear to Catholic Social Thought -- inherent human dignity, or the "sacredness" of human life -- offering some interesting though surely controversial thoughts (from an article by the same title in "The Saturday Review," June 25, 1864):

Few phrases are oftener on our lips than "the sacredness of human life."  It is used on both sides, for instance, in the argument about capital punishments, and on almost all occasions it passes muster as the expression of an accredited maxim which it is impossible either to misunderstand or to deny to be true.  It is not, however, easy to assign to it a meaning which fulfills both these conditions by plainly asserting an indisputable truth . . . . [jump through for more]

To take it as an assertion that actual physical existence should never under any circumstances be voluntarily abridged, is to turn it into an obvious untruth.  Probably no one ever really doubted that it is right for people to kill in certain cases -- as, for instance, in the case of self-defence.  The fairest interpretation of it probably is, that there is a mystery about human life which we do not thoroughly understand, and that the existence of this mystery to some extent ties our hands in dealing with it.  This, no doubt, is true, and the connexion between this truth and religious belief is obvious.  So long as men believe that they were created by and owe duties to God, they will of necessity feel more or less forcibly the truth of the ancient maxim, that a man ought no more to consider his own life with exclusive reference to the personal satisfaction which it gives to him than a soldier ought to consider his conduct in a campaign from the same point of view.  The force of this sentiment, the extent to which it prevails, and the degree of obedience which is paid to it, are amongst the most curious of the facts relating to human nature, and form perhaps the strongest testimony that can be derived from experience to the tacit, informally religious convictions of mankind . . . .

A sentiment, especially if it is general, and on the whole beneficent, is a very good thing in its way; but it is always necessary to set bounds to it, and the difficulty is to discover the principle on which the bounds should be set.  The sentiment about human life does not prevent war; it does not prevent the destruction of life in self-defence, or for some other reasons; and it is a moot point whether it ought in all cases to prevent capital punishment.  All sensible people would agree that it ought to prevent the substitution of a gratuitous distribution of poison . . . for a hospital of incurables, and that it ought not to prevent war.  Why is this?   . . . . Where are we to begin to reason, and how far ought we to trust our reason in this matter?  This is one of the many questions which show the impossibility of regarding morality as a fixed and definite science.  It does and must vary slightly from time to time.  All that can be said is this, that the morality of a given age is a set of rules based upon and expressing a compromise between different sets of feelings and wishes.  One set of passions prompt us to destroy human life under certain circumstances, another set prompt us to spare it under all circumstances. 

The moral rules which obtain at any given time and place define that mode of guiding and indulging the passions which then and there appears on the whole best calculated to promote the general good as it is then and there conceived.  We English in the nineteenth century draw the line just below hanging.  Perhaps in the twentieth we shall regulate infanticide, and poison people who suffer hydrophobia; perhaps, on the other hand, we shall abolish capital punishment; perhaps we shall all, in time, profess Quakerism.