The Imago Dei and the Infinite Value of Human Life

The Imago Dei and the Infinite Value of Human Life

I. Introduction America’s response to COVID-19 has brought substantive questions about how we value human life to the surface of our public consciousness. In both social and medical contexts, we have been confronted by the challenge of determining the lengths to which it is reasonable to go in order to save or extend human lives. Communities have closed down public commerce, sending millions of workers home and expanding food insecurity.1 Long term care facilities were barricaded to attempt to prevent exposure to vulnerable people.2 Prisons were isolated, while nursing homes effectively became prisons. 3 Hospitals also imposed restrictions on caretakers for those under their care: complaints about families having to FaceTime their hospital-bound loved-ones proliferated through social media.4 Such restrictive policies quickly generated a counterreaction, which challenged the premise that going to such lengths to contain COVID-19 was worth the collateral damage being imposed. Responsible critics noted that enforced social distancing generated massive economic devastation, which has historically been correlated with rising mortality rates and which disproportionately affects working class Americans.5 They also raised concerns that both voluntary and involuntary delays in medical care contributed to the rise in all-cause mortality, in addition to rises in suicides and drug abuse.6 Determining what sorts of policies we ought to adopt within a pandemic poses difficult questions for Christian ethicists. Judgments about their effectiveness seems to require aggregating deaths and comparing tradeoffs, forms of reasoning that seem ineradicably consequentialist or utilitarian.7 As Rebecca Mitsos writes about visitor policies for parents of sick children that hospitals developed in response to COVID-19: Such policies are always developed for utilitarian reasons that sacrifice some benefits for individual patients and families to maximize benefits for the community. The community benefit accrues because such policies limit the spread of infection. During the COVID-19 pandemic, such policies also allow the conservation of scarce PPE [personal protective equipment]. But they impose burdens on parents and may be psychologically detrimental for individual patients.8 Not surprisingly, a number of high-profile Christians challenged the utilitarianism embedded within discussions about the value of various public policy responses by asserting that every individual is made in the image of God.9 There are two distinct ways of framing the use of the imago Dei by Christians averse to utilitarianism: that the individual has “infinite value,” and that his or her life cannot be aggregated and traded off against the value of other lives. These inferences are extremely intuitive for many Christians, and conveniently supply a bulwark 2 against a utilitarianism that would occasionally generate morally repugnant outcomes.10 For instance, John Kilner raises concerns about employing the economically loaded language of “value” or “worth” for describing the special status of human beings, as it seems to put human beings on a scale that would require balancing lives against other goods. Eventually, the value of those other goods might outweigh the value of an individual life. While the assertion of infinite value seems to escape the problem, Kilner contends that such an approach risks implying “human beings rival God in their worth”.11 Practically, a commitment to the infinite value of a person’s life simply seems untenable. For one, preserving the lives of infinitely valuable persons would seem to require a no-risk threshold for engaging in necessary activities, especially when there is a pandemic afoot. One might conclude that the assertion of infinite value is either empty rhetoric or requires extreme, untenable sacrifices to save a life. There are limits to the types of costs we are willing to pay in order to add more time to our own lives, or even to add to the lives of others who are dependent upon us.12 These threads need unraveling in order to specify what the assertion that every individual is infinitely valuable means and what ethical implications it might or might not have for our response to a pandemic. In what follows I offer a hasty sketch of the doctrine of the imago Dei to argue that the peculiar significance of humanity’s infinite value does not require us to seek the infinite, or even maximum, duration for our lives and permits some comparative judgments between groups in forming public policies. These considerations are both exploratory and tentative, not to mention incomplete: the “image of God” is not so load-bearing that one can generate every norm one needs for responsible action in a pandemic from it. Yet I try to supply enough detail to the doctrine in order to see how it might inform three distinct questions: what sorts of visitation policy