The right to life is that inalienable right which belongs to every human person solely by virtue of her personhood: the right to the affirmation and protection of her life. It is not conferred upon the person but recognized in her. It is not the result of a social convention but the normative consequence of what the person, from the standpoint of her being, is. The right to life is not an arbitrary legal enactment but a concretization of the Personalist Norm applied to that good without which all other goods of the person would become void: life itself.
From the book
“The forgetting of personhood is always also a morally false attitude. It is not merely an error — it is an injustice. It always entails the dehumanization of the human being.”
— Why This Concerns Us All, Chapter 5
Ontological Ground
The right to life is rooted in the ontological dignity of the person. Because the human being is the perfectissimum in tota natura (Thomas Aquinas) and possesses an inalienable, objective value, affirmation and protection are owed to her life. The Personalist Norm — “The human person is to be affirmed and loved for her own sake” — is its immediate normative foundation. The right to life is its concretization: whoever affirms the person necessarily affirms also her existence. Whoever takes or denies her life violates the norm in its most elementary case of application.
Because personhood is not bound to actual person-behavior but belongs to the first dimension — the being of the person as such — the right to life holds for every human person: from the embryo, through the sick and the disabled, to the dying. It does not depend on consciousness, the use of reason, or social recognition, but solely on the personhood that the human being is from fertilization onward.
Mode of Being: Ideal Being
Ontologically, the right to life — like every objective norm and every inalienable right — exists in the mode of being of ideal being. In realistic phenomenology (Scheler, Hildebrand, Reinach, Seifert), on which Bexten’s ontology builds, ideal being is the mode of being of ontologically autonomous, objectively timeless and valid essences, values, and normative states of affairs: they hold independently of whether anyone thinks, recognizes, or enacts them. They are neither real things (like the body and soul of the person), nor mere possibilities, nor intentional structures (like a literary work of art), but objectively valid spiritual-ideal entities. Rights, values, and essential laws belong to this order. Adolf Reinach systematically developed this insight in his The Apriori Foundations of the Civil Law (1913): rights are neither mere positive enactments nor mere facts, but ideal essential laws with objective validity. The right to life is therefore realized in the individual personhood but not produced by it: its validity springs from the dignity of the person herself.
Violations of the Right to Life
Where the right to life is disregarded, practical oblivion of the person becomes manifest. Typical cases are abortion, assisted suicide, euthanasia, torture, arbitrary killing, and every form of instrumentalization that subordinates the life of the person to an alien end. In all these cases the human being is not affirmed as a someone for her own sake, but treated as an available something. According to Bexten this is not merely an error, but an injustice against the order of personhood (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 278, 300—306).
Ontological Classification
Superordinate concept: Personalist Norm
Mode of being: Ideal being (ontologically autonomous, objectively timeless and valid)
Ontological relations:
- has ontological ground: Ontological Dignity
- is value-response to: Personhood
- has mode of being: Ideal Being
- is violated by: Abortion, Assisted Suicide
Chapter assignment: Chapter 4: Personhood (esp. 4.7.5), Chapter 5: Oblivion of the Person
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Wojtyła, Karol: Love and Responsibility, transl. H. T. Willetts (the Personalist Norm).
- Spaemann, Robert: Persons. The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’, transl. Oliver O’Donovan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006 (personal dignity as the ground of human rights).
- Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 94, a. 2 (natural law as the basis of inalienable rights).
- Reinach, Adolf (1913): Die apriorischen Grundlagen des bürgerlichen Rechts. Halle: Niemeyer (German) (rights as ideal essential laws with objective validity).
- Ingarden, Roman (1964): Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt, vol. I. Tübingen (German) (modes of being and ideal being).