Human Dignity and Bioethics

276 | Gilbert Meilaender
Notes
1
Summa Theologiae, IIaIIae, q. 64, a. 2, ad. 3. We should not imagine that this
idea is a peculiarity of Aquinas. Thus, for example, in his Second Treatise (1690),
John Locke writes (paragraph 11) that a murderer may be killed in order “to secure
Men from the attempts of a Criminal, who having renounced Reason, the common
Rule and Measure, God hath given to Mankind, hath by the unjust Violence
and Slaughter he hath committed upon one, declared War against all Mankind,
and therefore may be destroyed as a Lyon or a Tyger, one of those wild Savage
Beasts, with whom Men can have no Society nor Security.”
2
John Paul II, The Gospel of Life (Boston: Pauline, 1995), par. 9. In a rather free
translation of the Latin, the English version has “personal dignity” for the Latin
dignitate.
3
Ruth Macklin, “Dignity is a Useless Concept,” BMJ 327 (2003): 1419-1420.
4
See Childress’s remarks in the transcript at www.bioethics.gov/transcripts/dec05/
session5.html. See also James F. Childress, “Epilogue: Looking Back to Look Forward,”
in Belmont Revisited: Ethical Principles for Research with Human Subjects, ed.
James F. Childress, Eric M. Meslin, and Harold T. Shapiro (Washington, D.C.:
Georgetown University Press, 2005), p. 246: “[T]he principle of human dignity is
central…[in the Council’s report, Human Cloning and Human Dignity], and the
concept of dehumanization is parasitic on that principle. However, while referred
to approximately fifteen times in the report, human dignity is nowhere clearly
spelled out. Hence, readers cannot easily determine whether, how, and why human
reproductive cloning constitutes dehumanization.”
5
Organ Donation: Opportunities for Action, ed. James F. Childress and Catharyn T.
Liverman (Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press, 2006), p. 233.
6
References will be given by page number in parentheses within the text.
7
John Galsworthy, One More River (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1961
[1933]), p. 104.
8
Walter Berns, For Capital Punishment (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of
America, 1991), p. 163.
9
Leon R. Kass, Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics
(San Francisco, California: Encounter Books, 2002), pp. 231-256. References will
be given by page number in parentheses within the text.
10
The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Philip Van Doren Stern (New York:
The Modern Library, 1940), pp. 455-456.
11
Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1995 [1847]), p. 158.
12
Ibid., p. 342.
13
Oliver O’Donovan, The Ways of Judgment (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans,
2005), p. 40.
14
Gabriel Marcel, The Existential Background of Human Dignity (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 134.
15
Ibid., p. 134.