It’s Wesley J. Smith day here at Sufficient Scruples! [See further, below.] I don’t know why - I just kept finding one more thing to comment on at his blog . . . (one of which I actually agreed with).

The last thing that caught my eye at Wesley Smith’s blog was the absurdly long subtitle/disclaimer printed in the top banner. Among many other things, it declares that:

My views expressed here . . . reflect my understanding that the philosophy of human exceptionalism is the bedrock of universal human rights. Or, to put it another way: human life matters.

“[T]he philosophy of human exceptionalism is the bedrock of universal human rights. Or, to put it another way: human life matters.”

Hmmm.

Technically, he’s making a logical equivalency there: “human life matters” is just “another way” of putting his claim that “yadda yadda human exceptionalism yadda yadda”. Which is to say that:

“T]he philosophy of human exceptionalism is the bedrock of universal human rights.”

means the same thing as

“[H]uman life matters.”

Except it doesn’t. (Mean the same thing, that is.) At all.

I gather that by “the philosophy of human exceptionalism” he means something like the claim that humans are unique in morally significant ways. (This would help explain why one of the other issues mentioned in his encyclopedic subtitle is “the dangers of animal rights/liberation”.) I am exasperated by people who use the word “philosophy” to mean “proposition” or “set of beliefs”, but never mind that now. His meaning - clearly apparent from his words here and the general tenor of his remarks on various issues - is that only humans hold a certain moral stature, because of facts about humans that make them different from other creatures. Well enough - many people agree.

But what he claims that proposition is equivalent to is merely that “humans matter”, which means no such thing at all. Humans could certainly “matter” even if they were different in no morally significant way from many or all other creatures, or indeed even if they held an inferior (but not negligible) moral status. And, the fact that some or most humans are morally distinct from all non-humans (if it is a fact) does not lead to a position of universal human rights, since virtually any feature of humans that would grant distinct moral status is a feature that not all human beings share (hence the debates over the criteria for, and limits of inclusiveness of, moral personhood within the human species).

He could, as many religious conservatives do, assert that the distinct feature of humans that all humans necessarily share is that they are human (often evidenced with dubious references to DNA). But this is no more than a claim that “humans are human” - which is tautologously true but is not only not equivalent to, but does not even support, the claim that “humans matter”.

Finally, he could simply assert that “humans matter” as a stipulative moral definition, but, aside from being implausible, that does not incorporate a claim of “human exceptionalism” except by way of the fact that “humans matter” - it is thus tautologous as a moral claim in the same way that “humans are human” is tautologous as an empirical claim.

The fact that he could be this confused in the title of his blog bodes ill for whatever he might have to say in the content.