Human Dignity and Bioethics

Dignity and Enhancement | 205
Notes
1
Franz Josef Wetz, “The Dignity of Man,” in Anatomy Art—Fascination Beneath
the Surface (catalogue of the exhibition) ed. Gunther von Hagens (Heidelberg:
Institute for Plastination, 2000), pp. 239-258.
2
Ibid., p. 242.
3
See Doron Shultziner, “Human dignity—functions and meanings,” Global Jurist
Topics 3 (2003): 1-21, citing Teresa Iglesias, “Bedrock Truths and the Dignity of
the Individual,” Logos 4 (2001): 114-134.
4
Some think this salience is undeserved: e.g., Ruth Macklin, “Dignity is a Useless
Concept,” British Medical Journal 327 (2003): 1419-1420, and Dieter Birnbacher,
“Human cloning and human dignity,” Reproductive BioMedicine Online 10, Supplement
1 (2005): 50-55. See also Richard E. Ashcroft, “Making sense of dignity,”
Journal of Medical Ethics 31 (2005): 679-682, and Timothy Caulfield and Roger
Brownsword, “Human dignity: a guide to policy making in the biotechnology
era?” Nature Reviews Genetics 7 (2006): 72-76.
5
E.g., Leon R. Kass, Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for
Bioethics (San Francisco, California: Encounter Books, 2002).
6
These first two meanings are discussed in Aurel Kolnai, “Dignity,” Philosophy 51
(1976): 251-271, p. 259.
7
For an earlier discussion of mine on the relation between enhancement and human
dignity, see Nick Bostrom, “In Defence of Posthuman Dignity,” Bioethics 19
(2005): 202-214.
8
Kolnai, op. cit., pp. 251-252.
9
Ibid., p. 252.
10
Ibid., pp. 253-254.
11
Ibid., p. 254.
12
Cf. Peter D. Kramer, Listening to Prozac (New York: Viking, 1993).
13
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), trans.
Elizabeth Livermore Forbes, in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer,
Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1948), available online, edited and with an introduction by P. James
Clark, at www.angelfire.com/wizard/regulus_antares/pico_della_mirandola.htm.
14
Kolnai, op. cit., pp. 265-266.
15
Kass, op. cit., p. 48.
16
Aryeh Routtenberg and Jacob Lindy, “Effects of the availability of rewarding
septal and hypothalamic stimulation on bar pressing for food under conditions
of deprivation,” Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology 60 (1965):
158-161.
17
For a discussion of the relations between dignity and suffering, see Daryl Pullman,
“Human dignity and the ethics and aesthetics of pain and suffering,” Theoretical
Medicine 23 (2002): 75-94.
18
David Pearce, “When Is It Best To Take Crack Cocaine?” LA Weekly, July 6-12,
2001.