Human Dignity and Bioethics

Human Dignity and Public Discourse | 225
times to the present, have had and do have grave reservations about
democracy.)
There is, of course, a necessary concern about unbridled populism,
raw majoritarianism, and the dangers of demagoguery. The framers
of our constitutional order were keenly aware of these problems.
Thus our system of representation, checks and balances, staggered
elections, vetoes, overrides, judicial review, and other mechanisms
conducive to more sober deliberation of how we ought to order or
life together. While this intentionally complex order slows the course
of turning arguments into law and public policy, it in no way restricts
the arguments that can be made.
Demagogic agitation for specific laws or policies is sometimes
employed, for instance, by identifying one’s policy preferences with
the will of God. Such appeals are usually limited to audiences where
it is thought they might be persuasive. There is also the demagoguery
of appeals to the more general public that—for instance in the controversy
over embryonic stem cell research—cruelly exploit human
suffering and exaggerated or unfounded hopes for cures. Demagoguery
will be always with us. Our constitutional order is not a machine
that runs of itself. It depends upon the cultivation of restraint, civility,
and disciplined reason, which are always in short supply. And we
do well to keep in mind that the wisest of our public philosophers,
from Tocqueville onward, cautioned not only against the tyranny of
the majority but also against the tyranny of the minority. Today that
caution is pertinent to the minority that would impose a rule that
authentically public discourse must be methodologically atheistic.
Restraint, civility, and disciplined reason are seriously undermined
by the hostility to “comprehensive accounts” in our public
discourse—especially if they are perceived to be religious in nature.
In most intellectual enterprises, and not least in ethics, there is a propensity
to emulate the methodologies and exactitude associated with
the physical sciences. Philosopher Thomas Nagel writes:
This reductionist dream is nourished by the extraordinary
success of the physical sciences in our time, not least in their
recent application to the understanding of life through molecular
biology. It is natural to try to take any successful intellectual
method as far as it will go. Yet the impulse to find