Vice President J. D. Vance made news in Munich by accusing the European political elite of not really believing in democracy. But another line stood out for me that I think is also worth noting. Vance defended the unique dignity of human life. From the speech:

Contrary to what you might hear a couple mountains over in Davos, the citizens of all of our nations don’t generally think of themselves as educated animals or as interchangeable cogs of a global economy.

It’s just one sentence in a 20-minute speech. But I think it is important because human exceptionalism is under increasing attack by some of society’s most powerful political and cultural forces. For example:

• Mainstream bioethics predominately claims that the objective status of being human is not what accords ultimate moral worth and that, rather, the subjective notion of being a “person” is. Under this view, some animals are persons and should be treated as such, and perniciously, some humans are non-persons and can hence be used accordingly, such as in medical experimentation and as sources of organs.
• The rapidly advancing “nature rights” environmentalism seeks to radically personalize flora, fauna, and even geological features as a means of stifling human thriving and liberty. It also threatens the very concept of “rights” because if everything has rights, in the end, nothing will. 
• Animal rights ideology — which must always be kept distinct from animal welfare — claims that believing humans have greater moral value than animals is “speciesism” (a concept also widely accepted in bioethics). Animal rightists believe that moral value comes from the ability to suffer, and that since animals feel pain just like humans, “a rat, is a pig, is a dog, is a boy.” This twisted thinking led PETA to claim in its infamous “Holocaust on Your Plate” campaign that “the leather sofa and handbag are the moral equivalent of the lampshades made from the skins of people killed in the death camps.”  
• The science establishment supports biotechnological research such as human cloning, radical eugenics reproductive technologies, and CRISPR germ line genetic engineering, which treat human procreation as a crass matter of manufacture. Some scientists also increasingly claim that whales and other higher mammals should be granted a status similar to human life.

This matters tremendously because human exceptionalism is the necessary predicate to universal human rights. Indeed, oppression, genocide, discrimination, slavery, and other evils that we inflict upon each other arise from refusing to see us all as equals based simply and objectively upon our humanity.

So, here’s hoping that simple sentence is the opening salvo of a much more prominent moral education campaign. Because the world needs it.

Cross-posted at National Review.