Bíos, zoé, and the limits of life (1)

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla June 1, 2026 0 comments Print

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Bíos, zoé, and the limits of life (1)

One of the principal values of philosophical thought has traditionally been the promotion of conceptual clarity: helping us to understand as well as possible what it is we are thinking when we think what we think. In the debate over the moral aspects of the limits of life, it is therefore important to reflect on the main concept at stake: the concept of life. It is neither necessary—nor probably possible—to arrive at a definitive definition of that concept, but it is indeed advisable to make the greatest possible effort to clarify the potential ambiguities to which our thinking and our discourse may be subject, often unconsciously, when we use an idea that is supposedly so clear. As I have argued in one recent book, the main reason why we tend to assign a qualitatively and quantitatively very different moral value to human lives than to the lives of other animals or living beings is the fact that, although both possess “life” in the sense of the ancient Greek concept of zoé (that is, biological life—what distinguishes a living entity, not only animals but also plants, fungi or bacteria, from an inanimate entity), only humans possess “life” in the sense of the ancient concept of bíos (that is, biographical life, a life that understands itself as a story).

The key element in this difference is, naturally, our capacity for language, since without language there are no stories worth speaking of; after all, one of the most universal ethical norms is the one that says that if an entity can talk to you, you should not eat it—not to mention the many major moral theories philosophers have developed on the basis of our rational capacity (the Greek lógos) to explain not only our capacity for moral judgment (that is, our status as moral agents), but also our nature as beings endowed with moral dignity. Of course, the boundaries are not completely sharp and well-defined, as nothing ever is in nature or in society: the question “which was your first ancestor who intrinsically possessed a right to life—that is, whom it would have been morally wrong to sacrifice and eat?” is difficult to answer both for those who think that only humans possess that right, and for those who think only animals do, or even for those who believe it is an intrinsic right of every living being. But for thousands of years we have managed quite well to function in society using more or less fuzzy concepts and negotiating diffuse boundaries on a case-by-case basis when we encounter them, so neither in this case does the problem of delimitation necessarily obscure the relative clarity with which we can generally apply in most cases, without much difficulty, the distinction between bíos and zoé.

This radically different moral status between humans and animals, based on the fact that the former have a biography and the latter do not, can be illustrated even with examples that do not refer to the question of whether a given being possesses a right to life. Consider the case of a simple corpse. If we find a human corpse whose identity we cannot ascertain, it seems that we have a moral duty to treat it with a minimum of dignity, including, at the very least, not leaving it exposed to the elements and at the mercy of scavengers. By contrast, if we are walking through the countryside and come across the corpse of a rabbit (say), it does not occur to us that we have an obligation to bury it with dignity or anything of the sort, nor does it seem wrong to us to leave it where it is so that within a few hours it will have been devoured by other animals (who also have a right to eat… as long as they are not feeding on humans). Having an ethically decorous post-mortem status seems to us to be an essential part of what constitutes a humanly dignified life. This is precisely the sense of the recent controversy sparked by the British Museum’s decision to stop calling the Egyptian mummies on display “mummies” and instead label them “mummified persons,” something that does not appear likely to be imitated by the neighboring Natural History Museum by renaming fossils as “fossilized animals” (I am referring, of course, to animal fossils; although, to be honest, I do not know whether the British Museum is also going to call the mummies of cats or crocodiles “mummified animals,” an expression which, if I am not mistaken, may already have been in use—not so much out of moral respect for the corpses of those creatures, but because calling them “mummies” might initially lead us to think they were human mummies… which, if that were the case, would mean that the semantics of the word “mummy” already by default includes the sense of “person” or “human being,” making the recent terminological decision redundant).

From these reflections, some might conclude that since we continue to regard human beings as “worthy of respect” even after death, it follows all the more that their lives must be respected while they are alive, and therefore that causing the death of a human being is never ethically justifiable—not even in cases of euthanasia or abortion that many people do accept. The error in this reasoning lies in continuing to assume the mistaken premise that what gives human life its dignity is biological life (zoé), rather than biographical life (bíos). Obviously, the dignity with which we believe a human corpse must be treated does not stem from the fact that the entity is biologically alive (for the very fact of no longer being alive is what makes it a corpse), but rather from our sense that bíos and zoé do not necessarily coincide in a precise manner: it is instead the fact that a person’s biography does not automatically end with their biological death (that is, the fact that even after death we can continue to regard her as “part of our community”) that leads us to accept the moral obligation to continue treating the person with respect even after she has died.

Similarly, the very process of dying can occur in ways that are more dignified or more undignified, and for many people what is most undignified of all is being reduced to what some authors (starting with the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben) have called bare life (or nuda vita) to a mere biological life in which only some vital functions remain, while almost everything that defined the person as a free and autonomous subject has disappeared. Of course, some people may feel that consciously or semi-consciously experiencing the intense suffering that can accompany such a state is part of their dignity, and they have every right to be allowed to continue suffering if that is their wish, or if that is how they interpret the teachings of their religion, or whatever. But other people have the same right not to go through that ordeal, or to do so in the shortest and least painful way possible. “They died quickly and without pain, when nothing but a long period of unbearable suffering awaited them, and were then mourned with respect” is something that many people would consider a fairly dignified ending to their biography, or at least far more dignified than the alternative of an endless agony.

In the next entry we shall apply the bíos – zoé distinction to the other extreme of human life, i.e., birth and conception.