Human Dignity and Bioethics

Commentary on Dennett | 91
affirming human dignity as well as a progressive brand of liberalism
in his ethics and politics. Herein lies the massive contradiction of his
system of thought. He boldly proclaims that we live in an accidental
universe without divine and natural support for the special dignity
of man as a species or as individuals; yet he retains a sentimental attachment
to liberal-democratic values that lead him to affirm a humane
society that respects the rights of persons and protects the weak
from exploitation by the strong and from other injustices. He also
objects to B. F. Skinner and the sociobiologists for reducing man to
the desires for pleasure, power, and procreation. And he condemns
Social Darwinism as “an odious misapplication of Darwin’s thinking”
and expresses outrage at child abuse, the exploitation of women,
and President Bush’s attempt to rewrite the Geneva Convention’s
definition of torture as violations of personal dignity. In short, he
is a conventional political liberal of the Cambridge, Massachusetts,
type whose moral doctrine is a version of neo-Kantian liberalism that
assumes the inherent worth and dignity of every human being. But
none of this follows logically from his Darwinian materialism and
it even contradicts it, which means Dennett’s humane liberalism is
a blind leap of faith that is just as dogmatic as the religious faith he
deplores.
In my essay, “Human Dignity and the Mystery of the Human
Soul,” I sought to expose some of these contradictions in Dennett’s
book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995). How could he say that the
universe is an accident—“it just happened to happen”—while claiming
that “the world is sacred” and that life is basically good? How can
he say that the human mind is a result of mindless and purposeless
evolutionary forces and that animal species are not essentially different
from each other, while also maintaining that “there is a huge
difference between the human mind and the minds of other species,
enough even to make a moral difference”? How can he destroy the
foundations of human dignity in cosmology and metaphysics, while
continuing to affirm human dignity and human rights in ethics and
politics? Thomas Jefferson was more consistent when he proclaimed
that our natural and human rights are “endowments of our Creator”
and derived from “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” that
give human beings a special moral status as rational beings in a universe
possessing the moral order of a benevolent Creator. The moral