Human Dignity and Bioethics

Human Dignity: the Council’s Vision | 257
discussion—who are the great and who the ordinary human beings—
may be far less obvious.
As it becomes less obvious, as the “comparative” sense of dignity
begins to be transformed by the “non-comparative,” as we are less
sure what is the “floor” and what the “height” of human worth, we
may incline to draw back a bit from some elements in the Council’s
discussion. For example, imagining a woman who was once a “virtuoso
violinist” and is now suffering from dementia, her “treasured
capacities” largely gone, the Council first affirms that she “remains
a full member of the human community, equally worthy of human
care.” But it then expresses puzzlement about what her dignity might
mean when those capacities are “fading or gone.” In the case of such
a virtuoso—the suggestion seems to be—dementia is especially degrading.
“For all people—and perhaps most vividly for those who
once stood high above the ordinary—the regression to dementia and
incompetence, with all its accompanying indignities and loss of selfcommand,
may seem dehumanizing and humiliating” (107).
This does not seem true to me. Moreover, I think there is something
objectionable about this way of putting the matter. I cannot
see why dementia afflicting this “virtuoso violinist” should be any
more vividly dehumanizing than it would be were it to afflict, say,
the woman who regularly empties the trash can in my office. Still
more, I would be reluctant to call dementia in either case dehumanizing.
I know of course that one might sometimes incline to the view
that dementia in the case of the violinist was somehow worse than
dementia in the case of the janitor, and there might be occasions
when I could be inclined to suppose that dementia in either case was
dehumanizing, but I would regard such inclinations as temptations
(to be resisted as best I could).
It is when I ask myself why these inclinations should be regarded
as temptations that the puzzles arise. I am reluctant to say that any
living human being, even one severely disabled by dementia, has lost
human dignity. Why? I am reluctant to say that some human beings—those
with certain highly developed capacities—have greater
dignity than others. Why?
These two puzzles are interrelated. If we assert that every human
being has dignity, someone is certain to ask from us an account of
what it is about human beings that gives them this equal dignity. And