Chapter 6

Regardless of the religious or moral premises with which we begin, most philosophers and legislators can agree upon a few basic principles. Foremost of these is the assertion that human beings have a right to self-determination. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the world community of nations in 1948 is so emphatic on this point that it employs forms of the word free thirty times in it’s short manifesto. We have a right to freedom from slavery, from forced marriage, from labor or sexual exploitation, and a hundred other abuses. We could put this another way: The highest right we have is to be treated as an “I” and not an “it,” a subject and not an object, a person with our own desires, interest, and intentions rather than a means to another persons ends. In this view of things, anything that turns us into an “it,” an object, a means or instrument or vehicle of another person’s interests or intentions, would be evil.

We think this is a powerful moral insight. Virtually all human evils can be interpreted in the light of this basic premise. Human trafficking, pornography, theft, fraud, rape–or more subtle evils, such as flattery, high-pressure sales, emotional manipulation–these and a thousand other varieties of wrongdoing objectify and instrumentalize other human beings. What greater perversity could we imagine then to take a human being made in the likeness and image of God and reduce her or him to a mere object among objects, a rung on the ladder of our own self interest, a stepping stone on the path to our own self aggrandizement, or a disposable diversion in our pursuit of a self-serving aim? Such, however, is the nature of most any human evil one could name.

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