SUNDAY, 26 OCTOBER 2025

Don’t worry, any vegans who may happen to stumble across this, I promise it won’t be a diatribe against veganism. I know I could have written ‘a Buddhist’ instead, but I’ve got to join the modern world of clickbait at some point if I hope to attract any readers, and while almost no one dislikes Buddhists, lots of people have a serious downer on vegans.

The main focus of this week’s blog is the concept of the sanctity of life. At one end of the spectrum stand purists such as Jains who most certainly wouldn’t harm a fly. Some vegans, I feel sure, share this feeling but from a different ideological base, for they aim to achieve, as much as is possible, a utilitarian reduction of suffering rather than to follow religious dogmas or spiritual convictions. The moral drive at the heart of both groups is probably similar, however. Equally, most Christians and Muslims affirm a passionate belief in the sanctity of life, but from the very different core doctrine that everything belongs to God, and only He can give life and only He has the right to take it away. (A specific individual can be both vegan and Christian, of course, which would be an interesting mix of principles within one person in the sense that the former tends to stress our closeness to non-human animal species, while the latter usually emphasises our dominion and stewardship over the rest of nature.)

Interesting, but hardly surprising. Human beings are a mass of contradictions, especially the incongruity that exists between what we profess to be our beliefs and moral standards and how we actually behave in our daily lives, and the compromises that all of us make when faced with the murkiness of reality. Most people, I suspect, would agree with the notion that life is sacrosanct even if they aren’t particularly religious, apart perhaps from nihilists, some types of existentialists, and perhaps post-humanists. But scratch beneath the surface of ‘Thou shalt not kill’ and its counterparts in other cultures and religions, and it is clear that this is often honoured more in the breach than in the observance.

The least controversial reason that is advanced for when someone has the right to take the life of another human being is self-defence. This becomes more complicated when theory meets reality, however, because laws usually include stipulations that the threat must be grave and immediate and that the violence inflicted in response must be proportionate, things which are often hard to prove, especially if there are no independent witnesses, and difficult to evaluate even when these exist. It is also an unrealistic demand to make of someone facing a perilous situation that they behave calmly and logically and remain in full control of themselves. There was a famous 1999 case in the UK in which a Norfolk man shot dead a teenage burglar who had broken into his home. He was found guilty of murder, later downgraded to manslaughter on appeal, and served five years in jail. The case became a cause célèbre, with the tabloids not slow to spot their chance to sell a lot of newspapers by igniting and spreading moral panic and discord, and arguments raged about the right of someone to protect their property versus someone else’s right to life, even if that person is an individual of questionable moral standards. I think it’s fair to say that the spat generated more heat than light and the incident became little more than a proxy battle for the larger ideological clash between two radically different ways of seeing the world, which may be summed up as socially conservative and socially liberal.   

The right of the state to take the life of someone who commits a heinous crime is supported by a large number of people, probably a majority, in many countries and cultures, although the definition of ‘heinous’ varies wildly depending on the religious and cultural mores of the nation, with some countries, for example, executing gay men for taking part in consensual sex or even for the selling or buying of marijuana.  According to this way of thinking, the person committing a crime as terrible as murder has sacrificed his or her own right to life. There is a bleak Polish movie, A Short Film About Killing (1988), which explores this issue, showing first the brutal murder of a taxi driver and then the slow, bureaucratic murder of the killer by the state. The film was timely because the Polish government suspended the death penalty in the year that it was released before totally abolishing it in 1997, so the discussion was a heated one, and probably still is at the grass-roots level, I imagine, given the strength of Christianity in Polish politics.

The sanctity of life is the main reason advanced by many fundamentalist Christians for making abortion illegal. According to their beliefs, life begins at conception, so any action that does away with the fertilised egg after this moment, such as a morning-after pill or termination, is an attack on the sanctity of life and against the wishes of God. This broad-brush approach hides a host of moral complexities, however, most of them concerning the rights of the mother. Less adamant anti-abortionists, therefore, may concede that it can be performed if the mother’s life would be at risk from giving birth, but would sometimes not accept a pregnancy resulting from rape as sufficient justification, and certainly not a woman’s right to choose what to do with her own body. The fact that the same people who want to criminalise abortion tend to also be against the use of condoms or the contraceptive pill, things which do far more to reduce the number of terminations than prohibiting abortion would, seriously weakens their reasoning in my opinion, especially because terminations will then take place, as in the past, in dangerous secrecy in back street settings where the woman is at terrible risk.

There is nearly always a degree of disingenuousness when people talk unthinkingly about the sanctity of life, since the concept is quickly abandoned in specific situations, even among those who proclaim their principles most firmly and see their ethical standards as impervious to revision. The most obvious example of this is war. Suddenly in a war, the sanctity of life evaporates and it becomes acceptable, or even heroic, to kill someone from another country who is essentially the same as oneself, a pawn in the power games that nations play. In order to make us willing to kill other people in a conflict, or accept their being placed in concentration camps in our home country, governments have to strip them of their humanity and turn them into non-persons, the less than human enemy, as the Nazis did with Jews. Our natural empathy for others must be quashed before inhumanity can occur. Unfortunately, this turning a person into a non-person is far from difficult to achieve, as is shown by the famous Stanford prison experiment conducted by Zimbardo, who divided college students at random into two groups – jailers and prisoners – to role-play a prison scenario, an experiment which had to be ended early because the situation was spiralling out of control into cruel punishment and even violence.

One exception in which we negate our stated belief in the sanctity of life is when someone chooses to die rather than disavow their principles. There are countless examples from history when a person has been willing to give up life itself for their beliefs: for instance, the long list of Christian martyrs. In these situations, we tend to say that there are some things which are more important than life, which seems logically flawed if life is truly sacrosanct above all else. Furthermore, this goes against what we are taught as the basic rules of evolution where the primary instinct is to survive and reproduce. Suicide is another obvious example of a phenomenon where the death wish – Freud’s Thanatos – conquers the life wish – Freud’s Eros. Human beings are incredibly complex and every theoretical attempt to reduce them to the level of machines or biological zombies seems doomed to failure.

Just as we can become callous and brutal once we see another person as less than human, we can show a similar indifference to the suffering of non-human animals. Our attitude to them is totally contrary and confused, as outlined in a fascinating book by Herzog, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat. In his first category come pets we pamper and spoil and treat as part of the family, cute species such as pandas and dolphins, and exotic beasts of the wild like lions and tigers in nature documentaries; in the second come rats and wasps and cockroaches; in the third, cows and pigs and chickens. I’d add another category which Herzog also focuses on in his book: animals that are useful in some way or entertain us, such as police dogs and beasts of burden among the former and racehorses and performing seals among the latter. To most westerners, the idea of eating a dog feels repulsive and yet most of us will eat the meat from a pig despite that fact that the two species share many behavioural similarities, but because we place them in different categories the latter becomes fair game. We draw on language to help us in this distancing with regard to the animals we eat to prevent any outbreak of empathy: pigs become pork, cows become beef, and sheep become mutton or lamb.

In many ways our attitude towards non-human animals is exploitative. The primary loyalty and concern of human beings, as with all biological species, lies with their own kind, and since we stand at the top of the food chain, we have the power to use other animals for our own purposes. Many vegans react against this and will not take part in anything they consider to be exploitation, some refusing to have pets or ride a horse or wear materials like leather, silk and wool, and a few will go as far as arguing against the use of guide dogs for the blind. The arguments become even more complex when we consider our right to kill animals that may harm us, and no amount of sentiment or philosophical dexterity can provide a simple solution to the contradictions that arise if we reject this right. Is it justified to swat a mosquito which might give us malaria, for example, or the aedes aegypti which transmits dengue? Does the principle of self-defence operate in these situations, and should it extend to trying to wipe out the entire species? And what about culling animals which have become a threat to their local ecology, sometimes as a result of human activity, such as rabbits in Australia? If we see ourselves as the custodians of the planet, wouldn’t it be a dereliction of duty not to kill in order to solve an imbalance in nature, especially since we created it in the first place?

This seques nicely into nature’s attitude to the sanctity of life. In an obvious sense, of course, nature has no attitude except when we incarnate it and imbue it with human consciousness, but I think it’s fair to say that its primary function is to ensure that life as a whole continues. But in terms of the individual entities that possess life, nature seems indifferent: to me, to you, to a cockroach, and to Christ’s sparrows, even though ‘not one of them is forgotten before God’. The fate of an individual human being or a cockroach is unimportant, and this is true whether we see these as shells in which some mysterious and transcendental force called life is temporarily embodied or agree with Dawkins that they are mere hosts for the selfish gene. In my opinion, though, despite the cold logic of radical atheism, it is debatable whether society as a whole can thrive, or even survive, with such an attitude. A key part of being human is imagining a better world than that which exists in reality and finding reasons for the imperfections of the universe in which we live, and as beings that are self-conscious, we seem to have a need to find some kind of overarching meaning to life even though, when viewed with a disinterested eye, in truth there may be none.

Is life on earth so special that it matters if it ceases to exist, as one day far in the future it certainly will? Personally I find it very hard to believe that in a universe with billions or trillions of galaxies there is nowhere else where life has emerged. And once it does emerge, it is incredibly versatile and resilient, as the extremophiles that survive in volcanoes show since they have adapted to unbearable conditions of acidity, pressure and heat: life seems almost impossible to eliminate once it has taken root. Seeing ourselves as central to this process of life and the universe seems essential for human beings in order for us to be psychologically healthy, so although our lives on Earth seem very small as we gaze up into the skies, and absolutely microscopic when we read about trillions of galaxies, we cannot shed our anthropocentric way of thinking. We have to believe that human beings matter, even if viewed from the perspective of modern materialism, they clearly don’t.

Yet I can’t escape the feeling that these are dangerous thoughts. To adapt the text of The Brothers Karamazov, if life ceases to be sacrosanct, everything is permitted. So even if there are billions of planets out there on which life exists, and in reality it is ubiquitous and almost in one sense banal, and therefore we are nothing special and it wouldn’t make any difference if we became extinct, we have to act as if this isn’t the case if we wish to avoid the despair that can result from accepting this as fact. One thing which I think is underestimated by the more extreme advocates of science as a guiding principle is our desperate need to believe that we matter, and no amount of razor-sharp logic and scrupulous empiricism or knowledge of black holes and anti-matter and leptons and quarks will eradicate this need. On the other hand, the exigencies of everyday existence mean that we will always need to compromise when faced with brute reality, so we will hold firm to our cognitive dissonance and continue to believe that life is sacred while at the same time waging wars, consuming meat and killing cockroaches.