What is Man?

A week ago, one of my professors posed a question to my class. What makes a man a man? What would have to happen to a man to make him no longer a man? If he lost a leg would he still be a man? If he lost an arm? What if he lost all four of his limbs? We all seemed to be of the consensus that he would still be a man, albeit an armless, legless one.

At this point one girl remarked that if he lost his head he would be a dead man, to which we all laughed.

Okay, my professor said, what if he was barking like a dog, living like a dog? Or some other animal? Well, physically he would still be a man. Only his behavior would be different from most other men, and I couldn’t say that that would change the essence of what he is.

I started thinking about metaphysical attributes that humans possess and mere animals do not to try and determine if a man could lose one these attributes and be no more than a man. Humans are self-aware, whereas animals are not. We can contemplate our own existence, and ask questions about it. Animals cannot, as far as we can tell. Maybe being self-aware is what makes human life meaningful. But, then I thought of babies, which, to all intents and purposes are little more than human shaped slugs. They aren’t self-aware. They aren’t asking questions about their existence. They just cry when they’re hungry or tired or cold or when they’ve messed themselves and are uncomfortable. I can’t make a philosophical distinction between a baby and a man since all of the potential for manhood his there in a baby boy. Even without self-awareness, a man is still a man.

My professor then asked if a man without a conscience would still be a man. The ability to know right from wrong is another key difference between humans and animals. Many people in the class conceded that the lack of a conscience would turn a man into something else. I almost agreed with them, thinking of the horrors perpetrated by serial killers and rapists and the like. Surely they are something less than human. But then I thought of grown men with mental deficiencies that make them unable to distinguish right from wrong. Are these people something different from men because they happen to have this mental deficiency? I had to answer that they are men, even though they have such a deficiency.

I kept thinking about one of the scriptures that I used over and over again to teach people about our relationship to God: Romans 8:16-17. It reads, “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ.” That doesn’t just apply to people we like or people who behave in ways that we approve of, but every person on the earth.

I had to say that nothing could make a man less than a man, nor could anything make a woman less than a woman. Or in other words, nothing could happen to a human being to make him or her something less. There is something divine and sacred in human life, and nothing can take that away. If he demote someone to less than human when they do something horrific, as our favorite villains of the twentieth century, the Nazis, did, what we are really saying is that we don’t want to go through the effort of understanding them. (I won’t reiterate here what I recently wrote on the Nazis, but if you’d like to read it you can here) Animals don’t do the things they do for any rational reason, they just do things, and we want to think that no rational being would do anything horrific, so we say that they are less than human. Yet, man is capable of committing horrors. And, if guilty, man is worthy of the just punishment, which may be death.

At the same time, innocent human life is precious and should be preserved for its own sake. The devaluing of human life for any reason is the first step on the road to euthanasia, abortion, and even eugenics. All of these destroy the greatest of God’s creations: human life and the free agency it is endowed with. That is why I could not draw any line of when a man would become something else. Once a man, always a man. Once a woman, always a woman. Forgetting that gets us into dangerous philosophical ground. Forgetting that, I believe, makes it so much easier for us to commit horrors on our brothers and sisters.