A universal moral code is a value judgment that is ingrained into every human being as a constituent part of them.  It is not added on after conception, or learned through formal education, or absorbed through culture and civilization.

[Editor's note: This piece is being run in conjunction with Dr. James Carmine's piece, "Moral Shape, Rights and Abortion: There is No Universal Moral Code."] 

[Author’s Note: This essay is an abbreviated version of a much longer paper I posted on this subject ("What kind of car would Jesus drive to take his girlfriend to an abortion clinic?") where I fully explain each of the statements I make below.  I refer you to that article if you have specific questions about any aspect of my reasoning, summarized below.]

1. What is a “universal” moral code?

Before we can describe what a universal moral code is, we need to understand what it is not. 

Social and cultural values, education, and political and economic conditions can influence moral behavior both positively and negatively, but they do not “create” universal moral values.  For example, the same actions that are encouraged in a capitalist system are punished in a communist system.  There is nothing intrinsically right or wrong about owning your own business.  Decisions are made that label the act “good” in one system and “bad” in another, but these are political — not moral — judgments. 

In the same way, one society may encourage actions that help people who are less fortunate than them, while another encourages actions that kill people who are different from them.  This speaks volumes about the different character of the two societies, but it says absolutely nothing about the inherent content of morality.  It is either moral or immoral to do X, regardless of whether a public consensus exists or not supporting that belief.  Morality is not the product of human decisions.  Rather, human decisions are judged against how they conform to the universal moral code.

Moreover, there is no “morality gene.”  Human genetics can help explain why an autistic child cannot express love the way non-autistic people do, to use a related example.  But genetics does not determine what love “is” the way it determines hair color, height, a tendency toward certain diseases, etc.  The same is true of morality.  Certain genetic factors (such as those that contribute to mental retardation, personality disorders, etc.) may help suppress the innate aversion to committing a clearly immoral act in an individual human being.  But human genetics does not create this moral value in the first place.

Not every issue is a moral issue.  For example, it is neither intrinsically right nor wrong to prefer Coke to Pepsi, blondes to brunettes, or the Mets to the Yankees (although you may want to keep these opinions to yourself for your own personal safety, depending upon which soft drink company you work for, which part of Manhattan you live in, and the color of your spouse’s hair!).  But some issues do involve intrinsic moral issues, and no amount of obfuscation or rationalization will make that issue go away. 
In fact, the more an issue violates the universal moral code that is an intrinsic part of every human being, the more that moral code must be referenced to explain-away the immoral act.  We feel no basic need to justify a preference for Coke over Pepsi, etc., in terms of making a moral choice.  But we do feel the need to explain why terminating the existence of an otherwise healthy zygote, embryo, or fetus is not the act of killing a human baby.

Morality, therefore, is not the byproduct of an individual’s culture, civilization, education, level of sophistication, political/social/economic beliefs, personal decisions or evaluations, or the result of human genetics.  These forces may act upon a given individual to suppress or enhance their ability and/or desire to act morally, but they do not in themselves provide the specific moral content for determining whether something is right or wrong. 

A universal moral code is a value judgment that is ingrained into every human being as a constituent part of them.  It is not added on after conception, or learned through formal education, or absorbed through culture and civilization.  It is “instinctive” in the way it reveals itself.  But the content of the value(s) it expresses is not due to simple “instinct.”ⁱ

2. An example of a universal moral code.

“Do good” is a universal moral principle.  However, simply stating this does not help us understand what “good” actually is.  Anyone can do anything and label it “good.”  This is the relativistic way to express morality, and is commonly expressed as a political or social philosophy.  The concept of “good” to an environmentalist would not necessarily be the same as it is to a capitalist, or socialist, or a member of a cult, or a member of a political party.

The expression of a universal moral code must state, “Do good by doing X,” where “X” has sufficient substance to guide a morally-based decision.  To illustrate this substance, I have focused on the dual concepts of innocence and harm in relation to deliberate (not accidental or unintended) acts, and on human life rather than all life. 

The universal moral codeⁱⁱ can be expressed as follows:  It is morally wrong to deliberately harm an innocent human life.  This is as true for Islamo-fascists as it is for fundamentalist Christians, as it is for communists and capitalists, as it is for North Americans and Southeast Asians, as it is for blacks, whites, reds, greens, and yellows, as it is in the year 2006 or 206, or 2206. 

How do I know this to be true?  I have a simple test anyone can take to prove it to themselves.  Walk into a crowded public place and yell at the top of your voice, “I love chocolate donuts!”  See if anyone looks at you with revulsion.  They may think you’ve had too much coffee or too much sugar that morning, but they won’t run away in horror or call the police. 

Now do the same exact thing, but instead yell, “I love to rape and kill little children!” How many people do you think will shout “Me too!” as opposed to, “I’m going to kill you myself right now you perverted son of a bitch!”  If you think this test is unfair because society (rather than an innate moral code) has taught us that this is unacceptable behavior, go to a maximum security prison filled with rapists and killers – the kind of people who “reject society’s teachings” about rape and murder. 

If there is no universal moral code against harming innocent life, these people should have no problem with these comments.  They choose to rape and kill adults, you choose five-year-old children.  It’s the same basic act.  The age of the victim should not be an issue if the underlying “moral” foundation is a personal choice about accepting or rejecting a social consensus about rape and murder.

So when you announce your love for raping and killing little boys and girls, what do you think will happen?  Will 100 percent concur?  90 percent?  Seventy-five?  No.  The room will grow deathly quiet, and in about ten seconds when the dregs of society finish registering the thought of what you actually said, they will converge on you as one to rip the beating heart right out of your chest and immediately feed it back to you.

And why would these morally depraved despicable human beings do this?  Because each of them has a child, or a niece or nephew, or just a tiny shred of human decency still left in an otherwise empty soul.  And even though they may have rationalized away any innate moral prohibition against raping or killing other adults, they instinctively recognize that killing or abusing innocent human life is also a morally depraved thing to do.

Because they have been able to rationalize away, or ignore, or otherwise suppress the moral code that governs key aspects of adult relationships, doesn’t mean that moral code is gone, or that parts of it have vanished, or that it was never there.  Some moral guideposts may be buried so deep inside them that they will never again surface, but they are still there. And just because they have suppressed one aspect of the same, innate moral code we all share as part of being human, it doesn’t mean they have suppressed every shred of morality.

It’s no coincidence that every prison keeps child molesters and pedophiles separated from the other prisoners because if they didn’t, a man who committed the most unspeakable crimes would be so morally outraged they’d kill these prisoners the moment they had the opportunity.  If you think this is simply an American phenomena, then I invite you to pick another country of your choosing anywhere in the world and test this theory.  The result will be the same.ⁱⁱⁱ  And if this response is universally true across societies and across time, and cannot be accounted for by human genetics alone, then two things are certain.  (1) Something else must account for it, and (2) “it” (that is, a universal moral code) does indeed exist. 

The universal moral code deals with the deliberate harming of innocent human life.  I chose a five-year-old child to illustrate this because there can be no doubt about their intrinsic “innocence.”  And there can be no rationalization that they did something to “deserve it.”  

Human beings have no inbuilt aversion to killing other human beings.  They routinely do this through wars, executions, and occasional ritual sacrifice.  But in each case they justify their action based on a moral principle tied to the basic respect for innocent human life.  Wars are fought for justice and to protect the homeland — even by the aggressor who acts preemptively.  Criminals are executed after “fair trials” and due process.  We are even agonizing over how to treat captured Al Qaeda terrorists “humanely.”

Those societies that sacrificed children did not justify the indiscriminate slaughter of all children.  The society, through its leaders, took this action for the presumed “public interest” as they understood it in their primitive minds.  Contrast this with 50 million elective abortions in the United States.  The State did not try these human beings in a court of law, or fret about the aborted humans’ basic Rights.  The state didn’t even involve itself in the act, other than to sanction it legally on secular, constitutional grounds.  It simply allowed each individual woman to decide whether the innocent human life she was carrying would live or die for whatever reason she decided.  The only limitation was an artificially-imposed number of days before which anything goes, and after which the state must be involved in any decision she makes.  

And what reasoning did the state apply to make this possible?  The intrinsic morality of the act was not considered.  In fact, due to previous Court rulings, the issue of morality was specifically rejected as having any bearing on this decision at all.  The only issue on the table was the law man created for himself: the Constitution.  As long as the decision was in keeping with the Constitution, as interpreted by previous, equally-secular decisions, it was “legal.”

A legal action may be moral, or it may not be.  Slavery — a clearly immoral act that harmed innocent human life — was once legal, just the way abortion is legal today.  The fact that the Supreme Court allows abortion says nothing at all about the inherent morality or immorality of this action.  It only speaks to its legality.  It was legal to own another human being in 1860, and not in 1865. 

So, we cannot necessarily look to the law of the land to identify moral vs. immoral actions.  Laws represent human consensus, and human consensus is not the foundation of morality.  In a system of government where man-made law is premised on the belief that “The Creator” bestowed each person with “inalienable rights,” there is a greater tendency to produce morally-compatible laws, but as with slavery and abortion, there is no guarantee. 

The farther we move away from the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence to guide the secular processes and procedures outlined in the U.S. Constitution, the less likely this guarantee will be.  This allows for the legalization of elective abortion, which in turn leads to the tortured logic of partial birth abortions. 

The rationale for supporting elective abortions is premised on a belief that the object-in-question must meet certain subjective criteria to prove its humanity.  It must have a brain instead of a brain stem.  Its heart must be beating.  It must detach itself from the placenta and pass through the birth canal.  And so on, and so on.  This is the same subjective nonsense that allowed people to look at the color of a man’s skin and say that “it” did not fit the definition of a “human,” or has allowed us to make the same judgment about a person based on religion, or national origin, or intelligence, or expected or actual quality of life, or any other characteristic. 

The fact that such discrimination is prohibited today is nothing more than a historical fact.  It’s based on man-made law, which is based on man-made consensus.  That consensus, and the law it produces, can change over time, unlike a universal moral code that is timeless regardless of popular beliefs and wishes.

3.  Recognizing the existence of a common moral code by specifically denying it

Support for elective abortion clearly violates the universal moral code of doing no harm to innocent human life, which is why the developing child must be not be acknowledged as a “human baby.”  This is nothing more than rationalization disguised as objective analysis in furtherance of the goals and objectives of a political agenda. 

But it does illustrate an innate understanding about, and acceptance of, a universal moral prohibition against killing a developing human, since the only way to rationalize this act is to arbitrarily deny and/or explain away the child’s humanity by imposing artificial, man-made conditions on “it”.  It’s exactly the same way skin color once served the as a way to deny the basic humanity of other human beings and put them in slavery, or the way religious differences are used today to justify killing 3000 people because they worshipped the wrong God, and are thus “less than human.”

It also explains why partial-birth abortion is so necessary to preserving the man-made “Right to Choose,” and why it is fought for so hard by abortion advocates when a less draconian procedure would still abort the fetus.  An aborted fetus that survives is instantly acknowledged to be a human baby, regardless of whether the abortion occurred at 15 weeks or one day before full term.  There have been rare, but actual cases of a developing baby aborted before the legally-determined 20th week cutoff that nevertheless survived the procedure.  Two minutes earlier it had no rights, but now killing it would put the doctor or mother in prison.  Yet its only change in status is the presence or absence of an umbilical cord. 

Obviously, the chances of having “it” survive an abortion and magically turn into a human child becomes greater the closer a woman gets to her natural delivery date.  Killing it through normal methods may not be enough, but removing the contents of its brain will certainly do the trick.  When the lump of flesh is completely removed from a woman’s womb and disposed of in a bio-hazard bag, the argument as to its “humanity” becomes moot, because whatever it was, it’s now dead. 

Or, to put it in terms an abortion advocate can appreciate:  No brain.  No breathing.  No bother.

And yet, even this abomination shows that abortion proponents acknowledge the existence of this universal moral code.  The need to eliminate any discussion about a developing child’s humanity is the very thing that shows us they know that it’s human.  I’ve never been under any illusion about what ends up after the gestation cycle is completed for cow, a dog, a horse, or even a Wooly Mammoth.  And they’ve been extinct for almost 10,000 years!  So why is it such a mystery that intercourse between a human man and human woman produces a human child?

It’s precisely because it’s not a mystery that abortion advocates need to say that it’s not really a baby they’re killing.  That is, not yet, because the Supreme Court said it’s okay to abort the non-child child before an arbitrarily-chosen^iv cut-off date.  This doesn’t convince anyone who is looking for a real answer to when human life begins.  But it does advance a political agenda at the expense of the tissue mass under discussion.  And will presumably help the ex-mother-to-be sleep better at night because she isn’t really an ex-mother after all, just twelve ounces lighter.^v

Only Relativist logic assigns value to a human based on their perceived stage of worthiness to live.  When I look at a newborn baby girl I don’t see anything that resembles a thirty-year-old woman.  The head and limbs are not in the same size or proportion, and its body shape is completely different.  It doesn’t communicate the same way, or have any appreciation at all for its surroundings.  I’d be just as justified calling it “proto-Mary” as I would be to call the adult woman “Mary” if I based my criteria on the same distorted logic that abortionists use to distinguish between a 19- and 20-week-old fetus.

Creating human life is just that.  Creation does not mean that life can’t develop, and that in developing life cannot change appearance, often radically.  A caterpillar bears no resemblance at all to a butterfly, but still represents the same life – just at a different stage in development.  As 30-year-old Mary continues to age (or “develop”), her external features and internal organs will change too, again making her look different from a normal 30-year-old woman.  Change is what defines life.  Without it we’re dead.  So why should change be used to deny life to a developing human being, instead of indicating absolute proof of it?

You can take a trillion human sperm and a thousand human eggs and place them in two separate containers.  As long as they do not mix, human life is impossible.  But allow a single sperm and a single egg to unite inside a woman’s body, and human life has begun.  One sentence, identifying the precise moment in time when the status of each constituent element fundamentally changes, is all that is needed to supplement this statement with the logic to support it.  Find me the same parsimony in words to justify an elective abortion at week 19, 30, 22, 15, or any point in between, and I’ll support the wisdom of that choice instead of labeling it what it really is, a rationalization disguised as a thoughtful choice to advance a political agenda.

That some people define away the humanity of another person (a “Jew,” an “Infidel,” an unborn child), doesn’t mean that they are acting morally because they don’t believe they are killing an innocent life.  People rationalize away all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons to sleep better at night.  But calling a Jew a “monkey,” or a developing child an “undifferentiated tissue mass” doesn’t change its intrinsic value.  I may sincerely believe that my dog is the reincarnation of John F. Kennedy.  That doesn’t mean that Rover now deserves Secret Service protection.  It simply means that I’m “wrong,” and Rover is still a dog, no matter how sincere my belief. 

The same is true of rationalizations and belief systems that deny the basic humanity of another human being.  Even proponents of slavery who denied the human rights of Africans still demanded that they be treated as three-fifths human for purposes of political representation.  They didn’t demand the same for their cows and horses.  Their political, economic, and even “religious” beliefs may have stated emphatically that Africans were sub-human, but their actions showed that they still recognized the slaves’ basic humanity.  They felt the need to explain-away the dark-skinned peoples’ humanity to allow their worldview to stand, which means they implicitly understood that their actions conflicted with the common moral code.  So a system of rationalizations and definition-manipulations was employed to try and get around the problem. 

If morality is nothing more than the end-product of human decisions and human consensus, then good or bad, and right or wrong, has no meaning beyond what an individual or society says it has at any given point in time.  Might, therefore, makes right.  Thus, slavery could return one day, with whites as the slaves this time (or children under age 12, or individuals of Italian descent, or people of a certain height, etc.).  This would be neither right nor wrong, moral or immoral.  It would simply be “what is.”

If the only decision about protecting human life is a legal/political one based on personal wishes and political compromises, then any criteria could be established about any human life.  A child could be judged “not fully human” until it is capable of walking, talking, and even earning a living.  Euthanasia of the aged, infirm, and mentally challenged could be instituted on a similar basis.  These people are no more capable of “surviving independently” than a fetus attached to an umbilical cord.  None of these actions could be challenged as inherently “wrong,” since morality is only what we say it is.  They would simply be a reflection of society’s consensus.^vi

4. Where Does This Universal Moral Code Come From?

If a universal moral code can be shown to exist, as I have discussed above and at greater length in my previous expanded essay, and if society, culture, economics, civilization, local/national/world consensus, the environment, or human genetics doesn’t give us this universally-shared moral code, where does it come from, and how does it get there?

If you eliminate all the other “natural” explanations, you are left with only one rational conclusion. The universal moral code that every human shares is given to us at the moment of conception.  And, it comes from God. 

How do I know that conception is the exact moment this morality is bestowed upon us?  I employ a standard tool of any secular, social scientist, Occam’s Razor,^vii which says that the simplest, most straightforward answer is normally the correct one.  Conception is when a human life is created, and since core moral values are an intrinsic part of each of us, it is not something that is “added on.”  This, then, is the only possible time for it to occur.

Which means that the small, multi-celled “thing” is not an undifferentiated tissue mass, period.  It’s an undifferentiated human tissue mass that is in the earliest stages of its life-long development, of which in-utero development is just one step.  It is no more pre-human or proto-human than an unconscious, tube-fed, respirator-breathing ninety-year-old man on his deathbed is post-human, or non-human.  It’s simply at the earliest stage in its development, instead of at its final stage.

Where it gets more complicated is to understand what I mean by asserting that this universal morality came from God.  Referring to “God” is not the same thing as referring to Jesus, Allah, Yahweh, Buddha, “The Force” ala Luke Skywalker, or any other anthropomorphic or made-up variation of what is generically described as “The Creator;” aka He/Her/It or Whatever Created The Universe — and man ultimately along with it.  I’m not trying to belittle religious beliefs here; just making sure we don’t confuse what we believe “God” to be with what “God” really is.  God exists as God exists, in whatever form or presence that is, regardless of whether we completely, partially, or don’t comprehend it at all.  And since God by definition is that which started it all,^viii then it is to God we must look for the infusion of a universal moral code in every human being that is not the result of human activity, environmental influences, or simple genetics.  

Referring to “God,” therefore, is not the same thing as referring to “religion” or “religious tenets” like the Ten Commandments.  They are related, but not identical concepts, and may be viewed very differently depending upon the nature of the society and culture it operates in, not to mention the specific beliefs of the religion itself.  Most religions may reflect the basic concepts of morality, as well as urge individuals to make proper moral choices, but religion itself does not provide the content of that morality any more than society, culture, or an individual does.^ix

Discussing universally-shared moral values is not the same thing as discussing Christian beliefs vs. Muslim beliefs vs. Jewish beliefs, and so on.  Religion A may put forth a set of standards that differ from Religion B.  But underlying both, I contend, is a basic, intrinsically-understood moral foundation that helps tell us right from wrong in a given situation.  This means that certain options are always excluded, while other options may or may not be included, depending upon what each religion teaches.  And, as the Islamo-fascists have more than demonstrated, we also need to consider whether those teachings are being interpreted by honest, sincere people, or a group of self-righteous thugs.

What defines proper action, therefore, may be circumscribed in one religion (Quakers and pacifism, for example), while no such limitation automatically exists in another religion.  In this case, the basic morality of the action is never in question, just how it is applied to real world examples.  On the other hand, a clearly immoral action (such as raping and murdering a five-year-old child), can never be justified.  It isn’t that Religion A has different rules about this than Religion B, like Christians and Jews do about eating pork.  It’s that the action is absolutely prohibited regardless of which religion we discuss, be it Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Druid, Coptic, or any other faith.  Universal principles of morality apply across the board.

This fact allows us to recognize the difference between an honest dispute over the proper interpretation of a moral code,^x and an action that is morally wrong but is justified or rationalized in allegedly-moral terms.  It’s not wrong because I don’t like it, or wrong because I grew up in America instead of Tunisia, or lived my life in Alabama instead of New York, or because I’m a female instead of a male.  It’s wrong because it is wrong, and all the rationalizations and justifications in the world won’t make a dime’s worth of difference in changing this fact.

What has allowed elective abortion to supplant slavery as a national indignation is a combination of the factors I addressed above – self-interest, rationalization, hidden agendas – but something else too.  Those who took the “moral high ground” in sparking this debate had their own set of vested interests and hidden agendas.  Beginning with prayer in public schools and other public institutions, they took key provisions of the Declaration of Independence and substituted their own religious preferences for “God” so that paying homage to “Jesus,” not following a God-given moral code, became the focus of their efforts.

Because of this approach, moral Relativists were able to seize the debate and frame their core issues in a deceitful way.  Since Religion A claims to speak for God, and the Constitution forbids the state to establish an official religion, then both Religion A and the God it speaks for must be completely removed from the secular world.  This logic prevailed because the Constitution is not the Declaration of Independence, and drawing inspiration and support from God is not the same thing as making laws that reflect God’s rules as expressed by a particular religion.  It didn’t matter if what Christians believed perfectly matched 95% of the beliefs of every other religion.  The Constitution, though inspired by God-given rights, was still man’s law.  And man’s law did not permit the establishment of an official state religion.

By hijacking God and linking Him to a battle to promote their values, not only did the Christian community lose their fight, it allowed the notion of “God” – the basis for their claim – to be wiped out with it.  This then led to an even more determined fight to infuse “politics with religion.”  Relativists became even more relative to prevent their opponent’s success, and as the Relativists carried the fight to its relativistic extreme, atrocities like abortion on demand became the law of the land.

This, ultimately, explains why a concept like abortion could take hold and flourish in a society that condemns human rights abuses, and even passes laws against cruelty to animals, but it will allow a healthy 20-week-old developing child to be killed without the same level of due process it demands for suspected mass murders and captured terrorists.

5. Moral relativism today

Where abortionists draw their justification from man-made laws, not a God-based morality, Islamo-fascists accept the fact that God created a common moral code, but claim to have the exclusive right to interpret and enforce it.

The reason that Islamo-fascists view themselves as the ultimate arbiter of morality is obvious.  It allows them to arbitrarily assign “human status” to any group or individual, and then act accordingly within a supposedly moral framework.  But this is not an example of applying the common moral code to a real-world situation. Rather, it is a fairly transparent rationalization to benefit those who wish to act immorally by defining away the very immorality of their act, as if calling a tree a rock magically transforms its very essence into something completely different.

What is less obvious is the insidious way replacing God-given with man-made “Rights” brings us to the same outcome.  Here, instead of blowing up a school bus full of children and killing them all at once in the name of Allah, abortion kills these innocent human beings one-by-one in the name of a woman’s personal choice.

Where we lost our moral compass as a society is when we allowed rationalizations by venal, morally-corrupt individuals with a personal or hidden agenda to distort our language so that a “developing child” became a “choice.”  It also took the prohibition against state-sponsored religion and turned it into a questioning of the very existence of God.

The sad thing is, not all these distracting agendas can be attributed to the moral relativism of the Left.  As I indicated before, what allowed Relativists to succeed in banning God from our schools wasn’t the attacks by atheists and Left-wing radicals with a specific political agenda, but the preachers and religious leaders who insisted that Christianity become the de facto state religion.  Some of this came from well-intentioned, but thoroughly misguided efforts to instill moral values as one religion viewed them, instead of searching for the universal moral core which was always there waiting to be recognized. 

But it didn’t matter in the end whether Fighting for Jesus was done with the best of intentions, or was part of an effort to promote a private religious agenda.  The unintended, unexpected backlash was to strip any mention of religion from our public institutions. Now, instead of allowing our children to find the common moral code through our schools, morality is ignored or reduced to relativistic drivel.

Or taught to us by CNN, Reuters, and the New York Times.

Endnotes

i. Every human feels the need to vomit when they see or hear another human vomit.  This is instinct — a throwback to the days when human survival depended upon such clues when one member of the clan ingested a harmful substance that others may have eaten too.  But this instinct does not provide content.  The retching noise could be due to bad meat, bad water, bad mushrooms, or it could be due to a high fever or one individual’s unique allergy that is not shared by others.  Or, it could be due to me listening to Al Gore speak about Global Warming.  If Al was standing nearby, he’d feel the need to vomit too — not because he shared my views (i.e. “content”), but because of the purely physical stimuli.  He’d have the same response as everyone else to this auditory or visual stimuli, but a different “content” would provoke our individual reactions.

v. I can call a tree anything I want — a “couch,” a “rock,” a “cloud,” or make up something out of whole cloth.  It doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a tree.  That lump of tissue sucked out of a tube and into a sink wasn’t a cyst, or a tumor, or excess fatty tissue.  It was the son or daughter you’ll never know, because you have a man-made “Right” that a minimum of five justices on the Supreme Court gave you.  For those who focus their justification on seeds instead of trees to draw a line between potential and actual humans, it is true that a seed is not a tree until it is planted and grows.  But on the other hand, you can water a rock or brick or bicycle seat all you want, and it will never spring roots and grow branches.  So potential does count for something.  And may I further point out that whether the object in question is a tiny seed or full grown tree, no matter how long it grows it will never be a person.