Human Dignity and Bioethics

Human Dignity and the Future of Man | 169
moral choices, that moment is mediated through real relations, institutions,
customs and mores, and we may judge such things by their
success or failure at promoting proper regard for one another. Of
necessity these relationships will vary from close to distant, but as
such they moderate the pretentiousness of notions of “human dignity”
which begin and end with concerns for the fate of the “human
species” as such. While the rubric of human dignity does call forth
some attention to this highest level of generality, for that realm to be
its sole expression risks the impotent abstraction of the “telescopic
philanthropy” so well illustrated by the character of Mrs. Jellyby in
Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, whose unsuccessful efforts on behalf
of those far away made her oblivious to the needs of her own family.
This embodiment of human dignity in real relations does not
have to be comprehensive, let alone (as some transhumanists claim)
totalitarian, in order to be meaningful. 39 We can expect that there
will be outliers, deviants, criminals, and creative envelope-pushers
of all stripes who will not conform to the culturally, politically, socially,
and legally expressed common judgments of human dignity.
Cat Man can be permitted to be Cat Man without having to be respected
for being Cat Man; we can tolerate him while pitying his selfdefacing
self-promotion. This tolerance is worth preserving, since it
expresses that aspect of human dignity, which is found in freedom.
In fact, human dignity properly understood will doubtless provide
ample grounds for concerns about hypocrisy, properly understood as
the tribute vice plays to virtue. But knowing in advance that people
will break boundaries does not mean that the effort to contain their
influence should be abandoned, any more than the fact that people
continue to kill each other invalidates, in principle or practice, our
many efforts against homicide. 40
That real human dignity involves judgment and relationships is
the source of the most powerful argument against it. For by being
relational, the door is open for dignity to be based on how people
seem to be rather than how they actually are; and because it involves
judgment, dignity may be accorded to qualities that do not in fact
deserve to be honored. To “solve” these problems by reconstructing
dignity so that it involves neither judgment nor relation, however,
is to throw out the baby with the bath water. Instead, acknowledging
the problematic status of human dignity is part and parcel of