Human Dignity and Bioethics

218 | Richard John Neuhaus
conducted with intellectual and moral integrity, a question must be
raised about the nature of the authority of those who are called bioethicists.
This touches on politics and political legitimacy in addressing
bioethical controversies.
Dr. Schulman notes the complaint that the idea of the dignity
of the human person in international agreements and declarations
in the aftermath of World War II “does not offer clear and unambiguous
guidance in bioethical controversies.” He says, correctly,
that in such statements “the meaning, content, and foundations of
human dignity are never explicitly defined. Instead, the affirmation
of human dignity in these documents reflects a political consensus
among groups that may well have quite different beliefs about what
human dignity means, where it comes from, and what it entails. In
effect, ‘human dignity’ serves here as a placeholder for ‘whatever it
is about human beings that entitles them to basic human rights and
freedoms.’” He adds, “This practice makes a good deal of sense.”
It makes a great deal of sense indeed. In a world indelibly marked
and marred by the Holocaust, the Gulag Archipelago, Mao’s Great
Leap Forward, and myriad other crimes against humanity, a political
consensus as a placeholder against great evils, no matter how
intellectually rickety its structure, is not to be scorned. In A World
Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, 1 Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon describes
the ways in which the drafters of the declaration were keenly aware
that their goal was a political consensus, not a philosophical or moral
treatise on human nature and the rights and dignities attending human
nature. Given the enormous cultural, religious, intellectual, and
ideological diversity of those involved, a political consensus was a
great achievement. While rights and freedoms are positively asserted,
they are largely defined negatively against the background of evils
to which the declaration says, in effect, “Never again!” Thus was the
morally elementary rule “Do no harm” given new specificity.
Nor should it be thought that a political consensus is somehow
inferior to a coherent treatise on the moral and philosophical foundations
of human dignity. In a world that continues to be characterized
by what Saint Augustine called libido dominandi—the unbridled
lust for power and glory—politics is an instrument for the
restraint of great evil. In ethics, and in bioethics specifically, “politics”