As a Christian I believe that no one deserves to be hurt, tortured, injured, or killed. We are taught that all people are made equal in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), and because Jesus came to live amongst us as fully God and fully human (John 10:30) to instruct us on how to live his ways (Matthew 22:36-39). He taught us to love our enemies, pray for those who persecute us, to turn the other cheek when people would hurt us, to care for the oppressed, the widows and orphans, and to above all else, love God and love our neighbour [which is everyone!] as ourself.

For those of different religious persuasions, your answer may be different and I understand that using a religious basis for these kinds of arguments is not particularly effective.

Instead I offer you a different idea, one that I doubt people will be able to argue easily. If there is a bar or standard by which the right to human life can be measured, then that standard can be moved. As such, it is better to ensure that it doesn’t exist in the first place, ensuring that all people, everywhere are free from the threat of death. No one deserves to die.

However, if it does exist and there is a standard by which the right to human life is measured, following Murphy’s Law and the entirety of human history, this standard will be moved at some point, at some time, by those who wish to manipulate it for their own ends. Ultimately, these people will (as they have in the past) be able to adjust the standard and declare who deserves to die.

For just a few examples, see the following for times when the bar was adjusted to get rid of people that certain people or groups did not like:

• Several Roman Emperors ordered the deaths of thousands of Christians for their anti-Roman and monotheistic beliefs and practises in the first few centuries AD.
• When Mohammed rose up and penned the Qur’an he wrote that anyone who did not serve Allah and him were infidels who had a right to be killed. The deaths of thousands of Jews and Christians have followed in the centuries since.
• During the transatlantic slave trade, millions of African people were abducted and subjected to horrific conditions as their oppressors decreed they were less-than-human as justification for their crimes.
• It has happened to native indigenous people around the world, in the Americas, in Australia, across Africa and the Caribbean.
• There is also the brutality in Congo under Belgium’s occupation, in Algeria during French colonisation, in Japan’s horrific scientific labs during World War Two as they experimented on Chinese and Russian prisoners, in the treatment of women across the Middle East, in Nazi Germany, in Rwanda, in Cambodia…

Wherever there is a bar for adequate humanness or a standard which dictates who has the right to live, it will be exploited, abused, and moved, and people will die.

Having a standard such as this is also dangerous as it begs the question of who gets to decide where the bar sits? How close to the bar can one get before they must be killed or released? How is the matter decided anyway? What constitutes each crime?

These are the very questions that courts must decide and wrestle with daily, but courts are ultimately run by or beholden to the state. Should the state get to decide who lives and who dies? Historically that has not ended well for many. Interestingly, most of the examples I provided above were from mass killings ordained by or endorsed by the states in which they occurred. The state is ultimately run by humans who are fallible, corruptible, and unjust – as a similar saying goes: not all humans, but always humans.

We have literally just witnessed this recently with the execution of Marcellus Williams in the United States, who was put to death despite not having enough evidence to tie him to the case he was tried for. And right now in Afghanistan women are facing some of the most severe restrictions on their rights under the Taliban state. Then you have North Korea, where people live under extreme surveillance and threat every single day from their government. Not all of us are so fortunate as to be born in a democratic country or have the means to seek refuge in one.

The establishment of the United Nations in 1945, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was an incredible step for humankind. The first three articles alone set a powerful example which, if followed, would truly change the world that we live in.

I have begun to write about my opinion on the concept of security, and how it must evolve for the world that we currently live in. National security is easily one of the greatest barriers to the true realisation of all these rights, and until we are willing to reshape the international system to be based on Natural Security—which holds that every human being should act to achieve the highest good for all people, animals, and the environment—those all around the world will continue to suffer. And where one suffers, so will we all.

It’s a truth people don’t want to recognise, but for all the examples of horrible killings above, the perpetrators had to learn from somewhere. They learned from the hundreds of examples of other humans who tortured and maimed and killed those around them too. Hitler famously learned from the treatment of African slaves in America, and nowadays we have neo-Nazis running around. How many atrocities are being committed today because the precedent has been set, and there is not enough resistance to stop them (see: Hefner, Weinstein, R. Kelly, Epstein and Maxwell, P.Diddy…).

The saying: ‘no freedom until we are all equal’, is not an exaggeration. Likewise, declaring that ‘no one deserves to die’ is not one either.