Intrinsic Human Value Has to Be Taught

For some reason, we human beings have a real problem with
the concept of intrinsic human value. If a group of people doesn’t look like
us, or has different customs, or lacks some of our abilities, we think it’s obvious they’re not truly human. Have we
ever been right about this? Ever?

I came across this appalling description of the early days
of Australia in Bill Bryson’s In
a Sunburned Country: 

For most Europeans the Aborigines
were simply something that was in the way—“one of the natural hazards,” as the
scientist and natural historian Tim Flannery has described it. It helped to
regard them as essentially subhuman, a view that persisted well into the
twentieth century. As recently as the early 1960s, as John Pilger notes,
Queensland schools were using a textbook that likened Aborigines to “feral
jungle creatures”…. Such was the marginalization of the native peoples that
until 1967 the federal government did not even include them in national
censuses—did not, in other words, count them as people.

In Taming the Great South Land William J. Lines details examples
of the most appalling cruelty by settlers toward the natives—of Aborigines
butchered for dog food;…of another chased up a tree and tormented from below
with rifle shots…. What is perhaps most shocking is how casually so much of
this was done, and at all levels of society. In an 1839 history of Tasmania,
written by a visitor named Melville, the author relates how he went out one day
with “a respectable young gentleman” to hunt kangaroos. As they rounded a bend,
the young gentleman spied a form crouched in hiding behind a fallen tree.
Stepping over to investigate and “finding it only to be a native,” the appalled
Melville wrote, the gentleman lifted the muzzle to the native’s breast “and
shot him dead on the spot.”

Such behavior was virtually never treated
as a crime—indeed was sometimes officially countenanced. In 1805 the acting
judge advocate for New South Wales, the most senior judicial figure in the
land, declared that Aborigines had not the discipline or mental capacity for
courtroom proceedings; rather than plague the courts with their grievances,
settlers were instructed to track down the offending natives and “inflict such
punishment as they may merit”—as open an invitation to genocide as can be found
in English law…. Sometimes, under the pretense of compassion, Aborigines were
offered food that had been dosed with poison (pp 187-188).

Subhuman, not counted as people, openly and casually killed
because they were “in the way.” This is what human beings do to other human
beings. The group of people being disposed of might change from century to
century and place to place, but the reasoning used against them remains the
same: they don’t look like us, they can’t do what we do, they’re not fully
human.

In Australia in the 1800s, there was a culturally accepted
standard for qualifying as a human being, and the Aborigines didn’t meet it.
When, for the first time, white people were convicted and hanged for slaughtering
a group of them, “two of the accused protested, with evident sincerity, that
they hadn’t known killing Aborigines was illegal” (p. 189).

How is it possible they didn’t know they were committing
murder? Can you see our capacity for deceiving ourselves when it comes to the
subject of which human beings are "truly human"? After all the evidence of our
past egregious failures, why would any of us trust ourselves to set a line
defining who’s in and who’s out? And yet, we do. We are. 

We always recognize the horror of defining human beings out
of the human family after the
fact, once we no longer have anything to gain by oppressing those
particular people. But how can we prevent these atrocities from occurring in
the first place? How can we end the one we’re in the middle of? We have to recognize
and then fight the human tendency we have to deny the value of people who are
different from us. We have to teach
intrinsic human value—the value of every human being, regardless of his looks,
his size, or his ability—because our selfish drive to remove people who are “in
our way” prevents us from naturally seeing and accepting universal human
rights.