The value of being Human

People are special. More than merely intelligent, people are able to form strong and varied social bonds with one another for the benefit of society and the species as a whole. People have the capacity to see things as Good and Evil, which is complimented by a depth of emotion and feeling that has no equal in the rest of the animal kingdom. People have the ability to know things beyond their senses and perceptions, to explore the infinitude of 'what if', to reconstruct the past and predict the future in a limited scope. This penchant for understanding 'causes and effects' allows people to solve immediate and forthcoming problems using a variety of different methods and approaches, which in effect gives people a strong sense of free will. But most remarkable of all are the imagination and creativity of people, producing beauty of thought and expression in all aspects of life. This is why people are proud to be human, and why their vanity obscures and dominates their humility. This is the true value of a person.

But what specifically is the source of all of these aspects of humanity that people value? The body as a whole is a great tool and instrument for manifesting these aspects, but people have surpassed their raw physical abilities through technology, to the point where the body is now considered to be physically limiting. The body is still wonderfully useful, but not truly what people care about when appreciating another person (except in the areas of aesthetics and physical competition).

Ignoring personal arbitrary biases, what people care about are personalities: what people believe, what values they hold, and what choices they make. Personalities are influenced by the body to some extent, but they are more tightly influenced by other personalities. All personalities interface and communicate with the world through minds (and souls, if you want to add unnecessary widgets that don't have any additional explanatory power). In fact, personalities can't exist without minds, though they can exist with severe physical handicaps and limitations. It is our specifically human personalities that we value, not our specifically human bodies based on our specifically human genetics.

So, if we value someone at all, it is because of these human characteristics as manifested through their personalities. If an entity was not genetically human, but it still had the personality traits that we care about in humans, shouldn't we still value that entity as we value a human? Shouldn't we value that entity as 'human'? Suppose we were able to create, through breeding or engineering, a species of dog that had human intelligence. Wouldn't we be morally obligated to give them the same consideration and respect that we normally only hold for ourselves? This is the point where the 'soul' widget finds a use, in asserting the uniqueness of Humanity, so that even if an entity were to match the most important aspects of Humanity, it still would be deemed inferior. 

What if we took a small society of humans and started to selectively breed them for traits that were more canine, including personality? Let's say we did that over millions of years. These humans, at that point, would most likely resemble dogs and behave like dogs, but would they still be privileged with a soul? At what point during this genetic transformation would they lose their soul, if they were to lose it at all?

For a less time-consuming and more plausible example, let's say we took a human embryo and removed a chromosome, and did it in such a way so that the embryo would survive and be carried to term. That's a pretty drastic change in genetics, but it still came initially from the product of a man and a woman, and we didn't kill the lifeform, so if it ever had a soul, presumably it would still have one. If we continued to breed the new species with a soul, we could use the same trick to create another genetically regressive species with a soul. What if we used that trick all the way down to a single celled organism? Then all sorts of new creatures of the world would be descended from Adam and Eve, and have souls.

One could make the argument, I suppose, that the original embryo had a soul, but then it was forcibly removed by changing the genetics. This would be, in effect, murder, with the soul probably going off to heaven because of its pure innocence, even though no physical death was involved. So the embryo, though technically alive, would now be soulless  But what if we have a change of heart and put the chromosome that we took away back? Behold, a miracle! The embryo has a soul again!

Clearly, it is futile to try to determine the conditions for soulhood, for there are too many variables to take into account, too many ways in which the genome of a soul-bearing human can be cleaved. It would be difficult and ultimately immoral to base appreciation of an entity on soulhood. Personality is something that can be measured much more easily, and is a better indicator of what we truly want anyway.

If personality is our litmus test for humanity, then what do we say about the human embryo, or fetus, baby, or toddler? Are these early stages of human life somehow less 'human' than the adult stages? That is the implication, and that is the stance that must be adopted if personality is to be valued above all. If we consider only personality when determining whether an entity qualifies as a human, then it is quite obvious that a genetically human embryo is not a human in any of the senses that we care about; it has no personality, and thus has no value except in potential. Consider another genetically human entity that has no value or potential, my finger. I could chop off my finger and it would not change my personality appreciably. The value of me as a person does not lie in my finger. In the case of an embryo, there is no person to value.

Does an embryo have a soul? Does my finger have a soul? Where does the soul reside if not in the mind? The embryo is not a person, literally or figuratively. If a soul is claimed to reside there, then it must be claimed to reside everywhere. Abortion at this stage of the game is not murder; it's not even immoral. When the fetus develops a nervous system, that's when the line between person and non-person starts to get fuzzy.