ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the question of what makes life valuable and which lives count. It looks at the distinctive claim that life is sacred, looking at what it means and how plausible it might be. The chapter also looks at what it means in practice to say that life is sacred: what does the sanctity of life prevent readers from doing, and why life is sacred. If human life has value in its own right, inherent or intrinsic value, then that would be equivalent to saying that human beings have a right to life. In contrast to the use value that readers might find in objects, human beings have a kind of value that is not just based on what readers can get out of them, what readers can use them for. Since human beings cannot just be valuable for their results, they must be valuable in themselves, in their own right: they have an intrinsic or inherent value.
