The contrast case: both the Soviet Union and communist China abolished private ownership of farmland. Peasants were forced onto collective farms, their land, tools and animals taken; the grain they grew belonged to the state, which set the quota and took it first. A farmer who worked hard and a farmer who did not received the same ration, so the reason to work was destroyed along with the ownership. A Soviet decree of 7 August 1932 made taking grain from a collective field punishable by execution, or in mitigating circumstances no less than ten years in the camps with everything confiscated; it was applied to people gleaning a handful of grain left in the fields after harvest, and by October 1933 more than 200,000 had been sentenced under it, children among them. Famine followed in 1932 and 1933 — the historians Robert Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft put Soviet deaths at roughly five to seven million, and Anne Applebaum puts Ukraine alone at close to four million. In China, the communes of the Great Leap Forward produced the deadliest famine in recorded history between 1959 and 1961: Yang Jisheng, working from party archives, counted about 36 million dead, and Frank Dikötter puts it at 45 million. The land was taken first and the food followed.

In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), the Supreme Court ended race-conscious college admissions. One side argues that colorblind law is the equality pillar fulfilled: the state and its institutions may not sort citizens by race, full stop. The other side argues from the Fourteenth Amendment itself — that it was written after the Civil War specifically to lift a group the law had held down, and that the same Congress which passed it also created the Freedmen's Bureau, a race-conscious remedy for a race-conscious injury. On that reading, remedies aimed at a group are not a departure from the amendment but its original purpose. Both sides plant their flag on this pillar, and both claim the Constitution. Which reading of "equal rights" is the better one, and what evidence would settle it?

Canada legalised medical assistance in dying in June 2016, for adults whose natural death was "reasonably foreseeable." In 2021 Parliament removed that requirement, opening the programme to people who are not dying — 622 Canadians died that way in 2023, up from 463 the year before. Eligibility for those whose only underlying condition is mental illness has been scheduled and delayed three times, and is now set for March 2027; a committee of Parliament has recommended extending it to "mature minors," though no such law has passed. The totals have risen every year: 15,343 Canadians received MAID in 2023, about 4.7 percent of all deaths in the country — nearly one in twenty. Supporters frame it as autonomy and compassion: a person's life belongs to them. Critics, including disability-rights organisations and United Nations human-rights experts, warn that "the right to die" can quietly become an expectation for people whose care is inadequate. Both sides claim to defend human dignity, and in nine years the criteria have moved further than either side predicted.

The contrast case: where the conviction of intrinsic worth is absent, the state can treat lives as inputs. Documented in our own era: the mass internment and forced labour of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and the finding of the China Tribunal — an independent panel chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice, which reported in June 2019 — that forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience had been carried out "on a significant scale," with practitioners of Falun Gong as the principal source. When a state denies that a life has worth of its own, nothing in its own law remains to restrain it.