The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,257

an infant younger than a month did not count as murder, and loopholes were claimed by Abraham, King Solomon, and Yahweh himself for Plague #10.137 The prohibition became clearer in Talmudic Judaism and in Christianity, from which it was absorbed into the late Roman Empire. The prohibition came from an ideology that held that lives are owned by God, to be given and taken at his pleasure, so the lives of children no longer belonged to their parents. The upshot was a taboo in Western moral codes and legal systems on taking an identifiable human life: one could not deliberate on the value of the life of an individual in one’s midst. (Exceptions were exuberantly made, of course, for heretics, infidels, uncivilized tribes, enemy peoples, and transgressors of any of several hundred laws. And we continue to deliberate on the value of statistical lives, as opposed to identifiable lives, every time we send soldiers or police into harm’s way, or scrimp on expensive health and safety measures.)

It may seem odd to call the protection of identifiable human life a “taboo,” because it seems self-evident. The very act of holding the sacredness of life up to the light to examine it appears to be monstrous. But that reaction is precisely what makes a taboo a taboo, and questioning the identifiable-human-life taboo on intellectual and even moral grounds is certainly possible. In 1911 an English physician, Charles Mercier, presented arguments that infanticide should be considered a less heinous crime than the murder of an older child or an adult:The victim’s mind is not sufficiently developed to enable it to suffer from the contemplation of approaching suffering or death. It is incapable of feeling fear or terror. Nor is its consciousness sufficiently developed to enable it to suffer pain in appreciable degree. Its loss leaves no gap in any family circle, deprives no children of their breadwinner or their mother, no human being of a friend, helper, or companion.138

Today we know that infants do feel pain, but in other ways Mercier’s line of reasoning has been taken up by several contemporary philosophers—invariably pilloried when their essays are brought to light—who have probed the shadowy regions of our ethical intuitions in cases of abortion, animal rights, stem cell research, and euthanasia.139 And while few people would admit to observations like Mercier’s, they creep into intuitions that in practice distinguish the killing of a newborn by its mother from other kinds of homicide. Many European legal systems separate the two, defining a separate crime of infanticide or neonaticide, or granting the mother a presumption of temporary insanity.140 Even in the United States, which makes no such distinction, when a mother kills a newborn prosecutors often don’t prosecute, juries rarely convict, and those found guilty often avoid jail.141 Sometimes, as with the trash-can moms of 1997, a media circus removes any possibility of leniency, but even these young women were paroled after three years in jail.

Like the nuclear taboo, the human life taboo is in general a very good thing. Consider this memoir from a man whose family was migrating with a group of settlers from California to Oregon in 1846. During their journey they came across an abandoned eight-year-old Native American girl, who was starving, naked, and covered with sores.

A council among the men was held to see what should be done with her. My father wanted to take her along; others wanted to kill her and put her out of her misery. Father said that would be willful murder. A vote was taken and it was decided to do nothing about it, but to leave her where we found her. My mother and my aunt were unwilling to leave the little girl. They stayed behind to do all they could for her. When they finally joined us their eyes were wet with tears. Mother said she had knelt down by the little girl and had asked God to take care of her. One of the young men in charge of the horses felt so badly about leaving her, he went back and put a bullet through her head and put her out of her misery.142

Today the story leaves us in shock. But in the moral universe of the settlers, allowing the girl to die and actively ending her life were live options. Though we engage in similar reasoning when we put an aging pet or a horse with a broken leg out of its misery, we place humans in a sacred category. Trumping all