Human Dignity and Bioethics

222 | Richard John Neuhaus
academy or acting as such on the bench—are not deemed to be determinative.
Witness the democratic non-ratification of the Supreme
Court’s imposition of the unlimited abortion license.
To say that such decisions are rightly decided politically is not to
say that the resulting decisions will always be morally right. Those
who disagree with the decisions that are made must make their case
in the political arena. The product of bioethics may be prescriptive
in theory—resulting in “clear and unambiguous” guidelines—but,
in this constitutional order, it has to be persuasive in practice. In
fact, of course, disagreements among moral philosophers, including
bioethicists, are as strong as those found in the general public, and
probably stronger.
In the happy absence of philosopher kings, everybody enters the
process of debate, deliberation, and decision equipped only with
the powers of persuasion. Obviously, not everybody enters on equal
terms, since powers of persuasion, access to the means of persuasion,
and audiences inclined to be persuaded to one position or another
are far from equal. This is a highly unsatisfactory circumstance in
which the achievement of “clear and unambiguous” rules is rare and a
“political consensus” resting on a moral point of reference as a “placeholder”
may be deemed a great achievement.
The dignity of the human person—construed not, or not primarily,
as the assertion of the rights of the autonomous but as the obligation
to protect those whose autonomy is very limited—is such a
point of reference. It is complained that those who defend that point
of reference have an unfair advantage in that it is so widely shared in
our culture. They are engaged, it is said, not in moral or ethical argument
but in politics. As suggested earlier, however, politics is moral
argument about how we ought to order our life together. After the
June 1953 uprising in East Germany, the secretary of the Writers
Union distributed leaflets declaring that the people had lost the confidence
of the government and it would take redoubled efforts to win
it back. To which the playwright Bertolt Brecht is supposed to have
responded, “Would it not be easier in that case for the government to
dissolve the people and elect another?” Our present day bioethicists,
moral philosophers, and judges sometimes appear to want to heed
Brecht’s advice and dissolve the people that they have and who have
proven so recalcitrant to their expertise.