Between Beasts and Gods: Recovering the Person in a Disoriented Culture

Introductory Note:

Our modern culture is filled with compassion, but often misdirected. We’ve grown tender toward pets, tools, and ideas of comfort, while growing numb to the quiet suffering and dignity of the human person. This reflection is not meant to insult affection or scorn kindness: it’s an attempt to recover the proper order of love. True love is never sentiment alone. It is grounded in truth, ordered toward communion, and uniquely suited to persons. If this essay challenges you, I invite you to read it slowly, not defensively. The goal is not to condemn, but to reawaken something our world is at risk of forgetting: the immense and unrepeatable worth of the human person.

In today’s culture, it’s increasingly common to see dogs treated like children and human beings treated like burdens. We see pets dressed in clothes, given birthday parties, mourned as though they were sons or daughters. Meanwhile, unborn children are discarded, the elderly are euthanized, and those who are inconvenient or dependent are treated as expendable. This inversion isn’t just strange or eccentric, it’s morally disordered. It reveals that something foundational has been lost: our understanding of what it means to be a person.

The Two Modern Errors

Treating Animals Like Persons

Many in the modern West elevate pets to the level of persons. Dogs are called "fur babies." Owners become "pet parents." Emotional bonds once reserved for human family are projected onto animals. None of this means we shouldn’t care for our animals or treat them with affection and responsibility; we should. But animals are not persons. They do not possess rationality, free will, or moral agency. They are not capable of love in the full human sense, and they are not made in the image of God. To treat them as though they were is not just an exaggeration; it is a distortion of the moral order.

Treating Persons Like Animals

At the same time, our culture routinely treats human beings as if they were nothing more than advanced animals. We reduce thought to chemical reaction, love to instinct, and moral responsibility to social programming. We dispose of the unborn for convenience. We eliminate the elderly when they become expensive or inconvenient. We speak of consciousness as an illusion, of dignity as a construct, and of identity as mere biology. This, too, is a profound error—and a far more dangerous one.

The Loss of the Person

Both errors stem from the same root: the collapse of the concept of the person. The person is not merely a biological organism. A person is a being with rationality and will, made for relationship and capable of love. A person is not a thing to be used, optimized, or discarded. In classical theology, the person is the image-bearer of God, unique, unrepeatable, and inviolable.

Without this foundation, modern ethics flounders. Kant tried to preserve the dignity of the person by rooting it in rationality, but without God, rationality becomes just another evolutionary accident. Why should it matter more than strength or speed? Why should it confer dignity at all? An accident of nature is still an accident. Only a worldview that sees the person as intended can make sense of why every human life matters.

Sidebar: Rousseau and the Roots of Modern Confusion

Much of the modern collapse of personhood can be traced to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He famously argued that man is "born free but everywhere in chains" and that human beings are good by nature but corrupted by society. By elevating feeling over reason and emotion over formation, Rousseau helped usher in a culture that prizes self-expression above truth, instinct above virtue, and sentiment above love. In rejecting the classical and Christian idea that reason should govern the passions, Rousseau planted the seeds of today’s moral disorder, where dogs are treated as children, and children are treated as burdens.

The First Principle of Ethics

At the heart of any true ethical system is a single immovable axiom:

You may never treat a person as an object.

This principle underlies every other moral truth. A person may never be used, manipulated, commodified, or disposed of. A person must be honored as an end in themselves, never as a means. This is not because people are useful, intelligent, or independent, but because they are persons.

It is, of course, silly to treat a tool like a person. But it is morally catastrophic to treat a person like a tool. One is an error of affection. The other is a denial of justice.

Recovering the Order

To will rightly, we must restore the right order of being:

• Treat animals with care and responsibility, but do not confuse them with children.

• Show affection for animals, but do not imagine they are capable of love in the human sense.

• Defend human life, even when it is inconvenient, unproductive, or hidden.

• Remember that to be a person is to be made for communion with others, and ultimately with God.

Until we recover this order, we will continue to love what is not and neglect what is.

Conclusion

Modern culture offers us sentimentality in place of love, functionality in place of dignity, and instinct in place of will. But we are not beasts. We are not machines. We are persons.

To treat a person as an object is to violate the very structure of reality. To honor the person is to honor the image of the Creator.

And in that simple act of reverence, we begin again to live rightly in the world.

What relationships in my life might need to be reordered, not because I love too little, but because I’ve misplaced the kind of love certain beings are owed?