Human Dignity and Bioethics

226 | Richard John Neuhaus
an explanation of everything in physics has over the last fifty
years gotten out of control. The concepts of physical science
provide a very special, and partial, description of the world
that experience reveals to us. It is the world with all subjective
consciousness, sensory appearances, thought, value, purpose,
and will left out. What remains is the mathematically describable
order of things and events in space and time.… We have
more than one form of understanding. Different forms of
understanding are needed for different kinds of subject matter.
The great achievements of physical science do not make
it capable of encompassing everything, from mathematics to
ethics to the experiences of a living animal. 4
The concept of the dignity of the human person was arrived at,
and is today sustained, by such a different form of understanding. It
is a form of understanding that is carefully reasoned, frankly moral
and, for most people who affirm it, is in fact, if not by theoretical
necessity, inseparable from a comprehensive account that is unapologetically
acknowledged as religious. The hostility to admitting this
account to public discourse is longstanding. Indeed, it has long been
argued by some that moral referents should be eliminated altogether
from law and public policy, that ours is a strictly procedural polity
devoted only to means and prescinding from ends, and especially
from overtly moral ends. Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote
that it would be a great benefit “if every word of moral significance
could be banished from the law altogether, and other words adopted
which should convey legal ideas uncolored by anything outside the
law.” 5
But, of course, it was by ideas and experiences outside the law
that the concept of the dignity of the human person was enshrined
in the law. The word “enshrined” is used advisedly, indicating the
sacred sources of that dignity. In religious thought, and in Christian
thought specifically, the dignity of the human person has become the
touchstone of ethical reflection. Pope John Paul II wrote on several
occasions that the entirety of Catholic social doctrine rests on the understanding
of the dignity of the human person. 6 The Catechism of the
Catholic Church devotes no less than 23 pages to explaining the concept
and its implications. It is an explanation that in its essentials is