The Dignity of a Human Being as a Creation of God is Missing in the Debate Regarding Stem Cells and Cloning - Gary L. Morella

In the traditional Christian view, the state derives its authority from God (although the people may from time to time decide who exercises that authority) and the state is subject to the law of God including the Natural Law. In the Enlightenment view, the state derives its authority horizontally, from the people. It is the people, rather than the law of God, which defines in what way, if any, the power of the state will be limited. And, if the people give rights, the people can take them away.

The Christian moral vision sees the human person as indebted from the moment of conception and throughout his lifetime. He owes God and his parents, who cooperated with God in his creation by allowing God to be God, for his coming into existence and for his continued existence. He owes countless others for making his life and his enjoyment of life possible.

When we are obeying the laws of God, we are not just doing this to please a Lawgiver for His benefit, but for our benefits in both a physical and most especially a spiritual sense. What does it mean to say that a human being is a person? Dogs and cats are not persons. The human person is an end unto himself. Certain things have instrumental value for our benefit. Trees have temporal worth; they will not last for eternity. Other things have intrinsic worth; they are valuable in and of themselves. If you had to choose between your most beloved pet and your child, say in a burning home, there would be no question regarding your choice, which would be made instantly. If you had to chop down the most beautiful, longest living tree in the world to save your child, similarly the choice is very easy because a man has intrinsic worth, infinite value. The human soul will last for eternity whereas a tree’s life is measured in centuries at most, i.e., is finite. Man will sacrifice what is temporal for what is eternal. There is an obvious hierarchy of goods here.

What it means to be a person is to be free; we are not simply programmed. We decide what choices that we want to make to determine our character as opposed to the instinctive reaction of animals. Human beings are also capable of grasping truth. We know something is eternal, lasting, and true, i.e., we can differentiate between the temporal and the eternal. This puts us on a transcendental level, a level consisting of things that are eternal, lasting, and true. This is what makes us persons. We cannot be treated as instruments in that we are for the sake of something else, to be used like a tree might be cut down for furniture. We do not fall into that category; rather, we are for ourselves, ends into ourselves.

The Pope makes this truth of the person an absolute fundamental basis of his ethics. He asks, “What is the right way to respond to a human person?” First, he tells us what is not the right way. We cannot use a human person; we are not to be used in that we do not have instrumental but intrinsic value. He talks about the tendencies to use each other. In his book Love And Responsibility, he says “The commandment laid down in the New Testament demands from man love for others, for his neighbors – in the fullest sense, then, love for persons. For God, whom the commandment to love names first, is the most perfect personal Being. The whole world of created persons derives its distinctness from and its natural superiority over the world of things (non-persons) from a very particular resemblance to God. The commandment formulated in the New Testament, demanding love towards persons, is implicitly opposed to the principle of utilitarianism, which is unable to guarantee the love of one human being, one person for another. Christ’s commandment and the utilitarian principle seem to be on different levels, to be norms of a different order. They do not deal directly with the same thing: the commandment speaks of love for others, while the utilitarian principle points to pleasure not only as the basis on which we act but as the basis for rules of human behavior . . . If we start from what utilitarians accept as the basis for the regulation of human behavior we shall never arrive at love. The principle of ‘utility’ itself, of treating a person as a means to an end, will always stand in the way of love.”

If moral precepts were a function of doing what you want in a Kantian sense, then on the horizon awaits an iceberg of autonomous universal precepts created by another individual as a function of his unique rights standing directly in the way of the Titanic of your unique rights. The truth of the matter is that the orchestra on your “ship of rights” is not playing “Nearer my God to Thee”, but “Further away my God from Thee” with your selfish approval.

We must recognize that children are a gift from God Who chose to have new life brought forth through the loving embrace of spouses. He wanted life to be the result of an act of love by those committed to loving each other and the life that may be conceived as the result of their loving acts. God's design is to have children lovingly conceived and cared for by loving parents.

The Church distinguishes moral from immoral methods using the following principle. Moral methods assist nature, whereas immoral methods replace or substitute for the conjugal act that should be the source of new life. The justification for this principle is found in the Church's natural law theory of morality which sees God as the author of nature and the human person as a creature that is given the ability to live freely in accord with nature or as one who can violate nature. "Nature," here, does not refer simply to the biological laws of nature; rather it refers to the whole nature of the human person. The institution of marriage is a natural institution in that it meets natural needs of the human person both on the physical and spiritual level. The conjugal act represents the total self-giving of spouses, and since children are the result of and the most incarnational representation of that total self-giving, it is appropriate that children come to be only through an act of conjugal sexual intercourse.

The Natural Law is not just biological; it is spiritual or metaphysical. We are not reproducing to save the species; we are procreating to populate Heaven. Animals do the former; human beings created in the image and likeness of God do the latter. There is an inherent dignity when speaking of human reproduction that realizes the intrinsic dignity of a human being, in particular, the actions of a human being toward another human being within the holy sacrament of Marriage. These actions in and of themselves must, of necessity, be self-giving not selfish toward the spouse, and similarly toward the children – born or potential. Because of this dignity spouses and children are not instruments to be manipulated; they are creatures of God to be loved in the most caring fashion possible, as God loved us.

As The Instruction On Respect For Human Life (Donum Vitae) asserts:

Marriage possesses specific goods and values in its union and in procreation which cannot be likened to those existing in lower forms of life. Such values and meanings are of the personal order and determine from the moral point of view the meaning and limits of artificial interventions on procreation and on the origin of human life. (Intro.3)

What needs to be kept in mind is that procedures that are acceptable for the treatment of other animals are not acceptable for human beings; we may sterilize animals, crossbreed them, and create new life in test tubes, but we may not do these things to human life. This principle shows the falsity of the claim that the Church has a “physicalistic” or “biologistic” view of sex. What the Church does have is a personalist view of sex, or it would allow all of these procedures for human beings.

The reason why we may not do these things to human beings is that each and every human life is the result of a special act of creation by God. This is necessary because human life is immortal; it is ensouled by God at creation with the immortal soul being the form of the body. Only God can bring immortal life into existence. Although God is the true creator of human life, the role of the spouses in cooperating with God in His creation is not to be minimized; it is neither unimportant nor simply mechanical. As The Instruction On Respect For Human Life teaches, the creation of human life should be the result of a deliberate and willing act of sexual intercourse between two spouses.

By comparison with the transmission of other forms of life in the universe, the transmission of human life has a special character of its own, which derives from the special nature of the human person. “The transmission of human life is entrusted by nature to a personal and conscious act and as such is subject to the all-holy laws of God: immutable and inviolable laws which must be recognized and observed. For this reason one cannot use means and follow methods which could be licit in the transmission of the life of plants and animals.” (Intro. 4; the internal quotation is from John XXIII, Encyclical Letter Mater et Magistra (15 May 1961), III.)

The key thing that must be remembered is that since the creation of life on the part of God is a loving and free act, the creation of life on the part of the spouses in cooperating with God should also be the result of a loving and free act. Human life is not created by chance, it is not the result of the simple physical uniting of male and female; it involves a special act of creation by God. This crucial claim is at the center of the teaching of Church documents on human sexuality and reproduction, in particular, Humanae Vitae, which states at the outset that spouses collaborate with God in the transmission of life.

Mankind must realize that we are dealing with the violations of the sacred when we speak of human beings in a utilitarian fashion, the most serious of violations with eternal consequences in that we are not allowing God to be God.