There are questions that begin as philosophical puzzles but quickly reveal themselves as something deeper – questions about who we are, what we owe one another, and what it means to honour a life. For me, the question of what makes a human life morally inviolable is not an abstract exercise. It lies at the heart of my Father’s memoir and at the heart of my attempt to give voice to those who lived without one.
This reflection began with a jarring claim by the philosopher Peter Singer: that if consciousness is what gives a being moral worth, then a human who has irreversibly lost consciousness might be a more acceptable subject for dangerous experiments than a conscious animal. The argument is internally tidy, but its conclusion feels profoundly wrong. It reduces the human body to a biological remainder – something that, once emptied of consciousness, no longer carries meaning.
But this view cannot explain the world as we actually live it. It cannot explain why we treat the dead with reverence. It cannot explain why we do not experiment on corpses without consent. It cannot explain why families sit by hospital beds long after consciousness has gone. It cannot explain why the body of a loved one still matters.
These practices are not sentimental leftovers. They are expressions of a deeper truth: that a human being is never reducible to their current capacities. Even in the absence of consciousness, a body still belongs to someone – not as property, but as meaning. It is the vessel of a story, a relationship, a presence that shaped others. Its dignity remains.
Different philosophical traditions articulate this intuition in their own ways.
Kantian dignity
Kant argues that a person possesses a kind of worth that cannot be measured, traded, or lost. It does not depend on intelligence, usefulness, or awareness. It arises from being a rational being – but crucially, once you are a person, that dignity does not switch on and off depending on your current capacities.
From this follows his famous principle: A person must never be treated merely as a means.
Even a dying or unconscious person still stands in that moral category. Their body is not a tool. Their story is not over. Their dignity remains. This is the moral firewall Singer’s view lacks.
Christian dignity
The Christian tradition grounds dignity differently but reaches a similar conclusion. A human being has worth because they are made in the image of God. That worth is not earned, not conditional, not dependent on abilities. It is bestowed.
This is why Christian ethics insists on reverence for the vulnerable, the voiceless, the forgotten. It is why the body itself is treated with care even after death. It is why suffering, silence, and weakness are not signs of diminished value. In this view, dignity is something like a flame that never goes out, even when the person can no longer speak or think.
Phenomenological and relational views
These approaches begin from lived experience. They say: A person is not just a mind. A person is a presence, a history, a relationship, a meaning in the lives of others.
Even when consciousness is gone, the person remains a thou, not an it. Their body is still the vessel of a life that touched others. Their story continues through those who remember them.
This resonates deeply with the way I think – the way my Father’s story lives on through me, the way my home carries memory, the way my memoir tries to give voice to those who were never heard.
This is in fact one of the deepest resonances of 20th-century philosophy.
Martin Buber’s whole insight in his book I and Thou is that the world is divided not into objects and subjects, but into relationships. When we encounter another human being as a Thou, we meet them as a presence, a mystery, a whole. When we encounter them as an It, we reduce them to functions, categories, or uses.
For Buber, the Thou does not disappear when consciousness flickers or fades. The Thou is not a cognitive state. It is a relation, a way of being addressed and a way of responding.
Even when consciousness is gone, the person remains a thou, not an it.
In saying that, I am speaking straight from Buber’s heart.
It’s why my Father’s spoon became a monument. It’s why my Father preferred a doctor who would see him as more than a machine. It’s why I spent years transporting people who could not speak, yet whose presence still called forth care.
Buber would say: The Thou is not extinguished by silence. The Thou is not extinguished by incapacity. The Thou is not extinguished by death.
The I–Thou relation is a recognition of the other’s irreducible dignity – the very thing Singer’s framework cannot account for.
My memoir work feels very aligned with Buber’s philosophy. I am restoring the Thou to someone who was treated as an It by history. I am refusing the reductionism that flattens lives into functions. I am insisting that meaning, memory, and relationship are what make a life inviolable.
In a quiet way, my whole project is an I–Thou act.
Virtue ethics
Virtue ethics asks a different question: not “what capacities does the person have?” but “what kind of person should we be?” A virtuous society is one that treats the vulnerable with reverence, not utility. Using a human body as a means would corrupt our character, even if the person cannot feel harm. It would erode the moral culture that protects the weak.
This view protects dignity by protecting us.
The small objects that become monuments
These ideas are not abstractions for me. They are woven into the stories I carry.
When my Father left his village for the last time – though he may not have known it was forever – his Mother cried out, “You must take your spoon!” and thrust it into his hand. That simple object became, in its own way, a monument. He kept it hidden, carried it through upheaval and uncertainty, not because of its usefulness but because it held meaning. It was a fragment of home, of love, of identity. A reminder that he belonged somewhere, to someone.
No reductionist account of consciousness can explain why a spoon can become a legacy. But we know why. Because human life is made of meanings, not mechanisms.
The body as more than a machine
Once, in a playful conversation, I asked my Father whether he would prefer a doctor who was an atheist or one who was a believer. After a thoughtful pause, he said probably the believer – because the atheist might treat him “just like a body, like a car mechanic would.”
He wasn’t making a theological argument. He was expressing something simple and profound: We are not machines. We are not merely bodies. We must be treated with reverence.
Much of my working life was spent transporting special needs adults and children, many of whom could not communicate at all. In that world, questions about dignity, value, and the worth of the individual were not theoretical. They were daily realities. What do we value? What do we see? What kind of society do we want to be?
The danger of reductionism
Singer’s reductionism is not unique. I have known people who approached life the same way – everything reduced to science, everything dissected, everything flattened into mechanism. I knew someone who lived entirely in that mode. To him, almost nothing existed beyond facts. Meaning, morality, memory, mortality – all of it was dismissed or ignored as sentiment or illusion.
But life is more than facts. It is meanings. It is relationships. It is the fragile dignity of the vulnerable. It is the stories we inherit and the stories we pass on.
Reductionism can describe the body, but it cannot explain why a spoon becomes a monument. It can measure consciousness, but it cannot explain why we sit by the bedsides of the dying. It can analyse behaviour, but it cannot explain why the invisible deserve remembrance.
Dignity in the face of decline
We proclaim dignity, but we often fail to enact it. Not because people are cruel, but because dementia frightens us. Because decline frightens us. Because the loss of language, memory, and recognition confronts us with our own fragility.
It is fear — fear of old age, sickness, decline, and ultimately death, the subject we spend our lives trying to avoid — that makes us turn away. It is easier to avert our eyes than to remain present with someone who can no longer speak, no longer recognise us, no longer reflect back the person we want to be.
When my Father began to suffer from dementia, I cared for him with as much reverence as I could. But in the care home where he ended up, I saw others who had been abandoned entirely. No visitors. No family. No one to sit with them, to hold a hand, to speak their name. They were left to drift in a living death.
I remember once bringing the daughter of a Ukrainian friend to visit him. She stepped into the care home, took one look at the residents sitting in silence, and burst into tears. She apologised, but she didn’t need to. The sight had brought back the memory of her own father, who had lost his mind after a massive stroke. She couldn’t go into the room. The place itself – the stillness, the wheelchairs, the quiet – was enough to reopen the wound. That is the power these experiences have on us. They mark us. They stay with us.
And yet, even in that bleak environment, there were moments that revealed how much difference simple presence can make. I visited my Father every afternoon, even though I was now working. He hated being indoors all day, so I asked the management for permission to take him out, as I had done practically every day when we lived at home together. One afternoon I wheeled him down to the river by the Quay. He could barely speak by then, but I think he liked being out in the air, seeing the water move.
Across the river I saw a man running toward us in a white coat. He was breathless, panicked. He was a carer from the home. He said he didn’t know what had happened to my Father. I explained that I had permission to take him out. He stared at me in astonishment. He told me he had never known anyone to be taken out like that. Most residents, he said, rarely had visitors at all.
That moment has never left me. It revealed, in one simple scene, how easily people can be forgotten – not out of malice, but out of fear, exhaustion, avoidance, or the slow erosion of connection.
And later, when I worked delivering meals‑on‑wheels, I learned that this abandonment was not confined to care homes or an isolated tragedy. It was part of a much larger pattern, a quiet epidemic of loneliness and neglect that most people never see because they never step into those rooms. Many elderly people told me I was their only visitor that day. Some said it even at Christmas, even though they had family living nearby. That job opened my eyes. It showed me how loneliness can settle over a life like dust, unnoticed by the world outside.
But the person does remain. Even when consciousness is clouded, even when memory is gone, the Thou is still there. The body is still the vessel of a life that touched others. The story continues through those who remember.
This truth was not abstract for me. For years I transported special‑needs adults and children, many of whom could not communicate at all. Some could not speak; some could not understand; some lived in worlds entirely their own. Yet their presence called forth care, patience, and a kind of moral attention that no reductionist philosophy can account for. They were not “cases” or “conditions.” They were people — whole, fragile, deserving of reverence.
These experiences – my Father’s decline, the abandoned residents, the silent passengers I carried, the lonely elderly waiting for a single knock on the door – were never far from my mind. They formed a kind of moral apprenticeship. It is almost as if I was meant to see these things, to witness them, to record them, and now to transmit them to others. They taught me that dignity is not a theory. It is a practice. It is a way of seeing. It is a refusal to reduce a human being to their capacities, their usefulness, or their visibility.
The historical silence of the ordinary
This question of dignity is not only philosophical. It is historical.
I was struck recently by a historian who apologised for focusing too much on rulers and elites. The powerful leave behind monuments, inscriptions, letters, and chronicles. They shape the world in ways that are visible and lasting. Their flaws, magnified by their reach, can bring about disasters on a scale ordinary people never could. Their jealousies can become wars; their vanities can become famines.
But the vast majority of humanity – the poor, the dispossessed, the quiet, the unrecorded – left almost nothing behind. They lived and died without monuments. Their names vanished with the generation that knew them. Their lives shaped the world in ways that were intimate rather than monumental: through families, communities, small acts of endurance and care.
Their invisibility in the archive does not mean they were insignificant. It only means they were not preserved.
And here the ethical and the historical converge.
Singer’s reductionism says only consciousness gives value.
The archive’s bias says only the recorded are significant.
Both risk erasing the dignity of the ordinary, the silent, the forgotten.
Why this matters for my memoir
My Father’s story – and the stories of those around him – were not preserved in stone or parchment. They were not the stories of rulers or elites. They were the stories of people who lived in the shadows of history, whose lives were shaped by forces they did not control, and whose voices were rarely heard.
To write his memoir is to resist the reductionism that says only the conscious, the powerful, or the documented matter. It is to insist that every life has worth, even when the world fails to notice it. It is to give voice to someone who had none, and in doing so, to honour the countless others who remain invisible.
A human life is not valuable because it is conscious, or powerful, or recorded. It is valuable because it is human – because it is part of the fragile, interwoven fabric of our shared world.
Its dignity is not conditional.
Its worth is not earned.
Its silence does not diminish it.
To write, to remember, to bear witness – these are acts of justice. They restore visibility to the invisible. They affirm the dignity that was always there.
And that, ultimately, is the stance behind my memoir: that every life, no matter how quiet, carries a worth that cannot be reduced, revoked, or forgotten.
This whole philosophical journey feels entirely natural to me. I am not trying to prove anything. I am simply recognising what I already know in my bones: that a human life doesn’t end at the moment of death. It leaves traces, echoes, responsibilities. It leaves a shape in the world.
My Father isn’t ‘extinguished’ because the relationship didn’t end. It changed form, but it didn’t vanish. I carry him in my habits, memories, the stories in the memoir, my reflections, my ethics, my instinct to record and witness.
My Father’s shape is still here.