Granny Weatherwax: “There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
Mightily Oats: “It’s a lot more complicated than that–“
GW: “No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
MO: “Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes–“
GW: “But they starts with thinking about people as things…”
Terry Pratchett
People as things. Is that where sin starts?
Lying, stealing, killing, all reduce the victim to a thing, someone whose right to possession, truth, or even to live you can take away, for your own greed, or – to be deceitful or delusional about it – under the guise of a supposedly higher deal.
It’s an interesting idea, a rather grand one I think, that you can reduce all sin to such a simple beginning. People as things. Three words, to capture a concept as deep and vast as sin. Is it true though?
People as things begins with people. This notion of sin, then, assumes that you require another person to commit a sin against. Sin is only in relation to someone. Is that necessary? Lying, stealing, killing all do imply another, someone sinned against.
Is there any counterexample? It seems hard to think of any. Duty – that mythical, manipulated word – might try to convince you there is an absolute sin, unrelated to others – that of not fulfilling one’s supposed duty. But duty itself is often in relation to someone, whether an aggregation called a country, a family, so that isn’t a successful counter.
Perhaps there’s a duty you can define not in relation to others, like a duty not to litter. But that too usually comes down to others – why shouldn’t you litter? Because it affects people. Or is it because of some aesthetic or moral rule? The arbitrariness of those is just too glaring to take seriously. The notion of not littering as a duty itself is arbitrary – who determines what is a duty and what isn’t? And any justification for it, especially one that doesn’t relate to people, is another level of arbitrariness.
People (read creatures, if you want to not be speciest) are part of any discussion on sin because without people there is no one to sin against. A world without anyone would not have any sin, or morality.
The next is things. People as things – you take people, who are, as the preceding paragraphs claim, an apparently necessary ingredient, and treat them, not as people, but as something else, as things. Sin, by this idea, is a mismatch, like a cover that doesn’t fit the phone its bought for. The idea being that people are expected to be treated a certain way, and things another way, and when you treat people the way you treat things, you sin.
Which leads you to – how do you treat people? That’s easy. Not as things. As people. People and things, does not treating someone as a person imply treating them as a thing, and vice versa? That is to say, are they MECE, mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive? Can we say that everything is either a creature or a thing? And nothing is both, a creature and a thing? I think yes, notwithstanding odd outliers, everything is either living, meaning a creature, or non-living, meaning a thing. So they are collectively exhaustive. And nothing is both, nor none, living and non-living, so mutually exclusive.
Which means, if something is not a thing, then it is a person, and vice versa. So if you don’t treat someone as a thing, you treat them as a person, because there are no other categories than people and things. And if you don’t treat them as a person, that means you treat them as a thing – which means, you sin.
So then the question is, what does it mean to treat a person as a person, or as a thing? Like every subjective question, there’s no one objective universal answer. Different people will have different responses, and arbitrariness is inevitable, but I think you can still judge the validity of every answer, and their relative worth.
The best answer I know of is Kant’s – treat a person as a person treats themselves, or thinks of themselves – that is, as an end. That is, as someone who has value, not as some thing that is of no significance itself, only a means to something else. It is the difference between killing someone because your god or ideology supposedly demands it, or giving up your ideology because it demands killing someone. Or more mildly, shoving someone because they’re in your way, or taking a couple of steps to get across them.
Seen this way, people as things is nothing but a very familiar idea. People as things is the inversion, the flip side, of the Kantian rule, to treat humanity as an ends, never a means. A thing is a means, after all. Kant phrases it as f(x) = y, Pratchett as f-1(y) = x, both ways of expressing the same relation. One says morality is to treat humanity as an ends. The other says sin, immorality, is to treat people as things, that is, not as an end.
Beautifully, this idea holds across the entire range of magnitudes of sin. From cutting someone in the queue to committing genocide, the sin begins from treating the person as a thing to be sacrificed to some so-called higher need or ideal. The queue cutter subordinates a person and their time to his own, which he considers far more precious, thinking it fine for another to wait in his stead. The tyrant sacrifices people – others, obviously – for some so-called ‘vision’ of his; the importance of a person, of many millions of people ranking below someone’s diseased dream.
If treating people as things is as close to ‘wrong’ as one might get, what of the opposite, treating things as people? Those of us who live as recluses perhaps are more likely to anthropomorphize objects. It’s hard to see how it could be ‘sin’; if anything, one can argue it is the highest form of morality, that one’s morals now encompass not just the living but the non-living. Indeed, Aldo Leopold’s The Land Ethic to an extent does that. “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
Perhaps there are more nuances to it than I can see now. All the criticisms of Kantian deontology – including the story of Sartre’s French soldier – apply here, for it is the same idea, only, as Jacobi would say, inverted. Nevertheless, there is always something very attractive in a proposition so beautifully simple as people as things, all the more so when it claims to speak about something as wide and varied and complex as sin. And that too, with a fair degree of success, capturing as it does the spectrum of sin across different contexts. The simplicity and elegance, particularly in a world where everything seems to be ‘a lot more complicated than that’, alone make its worth thinking about.