Human Dignity and Bioethics

10
Modern and American Dignity
Peter Augustine Lawler
M
odern society—or at least its more sophisticated parts—is distinguished
by its concern for individual dignity. Individuals
demand to exist for themselves. They refuse to be reduced to useful
and expendable means for ends that are not their own. Increasingly,
modern government is based on the dignified principle that the individual
can’t be understood to exist for a community, a country, an
ideology, a God, or even a family. We think it undignified to believe
that earthly or real human beings exist for heavenly or imaginary
ones, as we believe religions once led us to believe. We also think it
undignified to regard today’s individuals as existing for human beings
of the future, as did the millenarian ideologies that disappeared
with the 20th century. Protecting my dignity, from this view, means
protecting what the moral fanatics are all too ready to sacrifice—my
particular life, my particular being, myself. 1 My purpose here is to
explore some of the modern dimensions of the dignified “I,” and
so to show how indispensable, wonderful, and strange the idea of
personal dignity is for us Americans. One reason for this exploration
is to show how technology and biotechnology are both reflections of
and challenges to our proper understanding of our ineradicable human
dignity.
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