Human Dignity and Bioethics

282 | Peter Augustine Lawler
disconnect dignity from gratitude and so is more dignified than those
who engage in that self-deception.
Kass responds that Meilaender’s dignified patient depends upon
his capacity to engage in action and thought appropriate to his human
situation. That patient is not really pure patient. He’s partly
a patient and partly not; a pure patient—someone, say, in the last
stages of Alzheimer’s—would be perfectly passive and so incapable
of displaying dignified virtue. Dennett claims it’s enough to say that
we will have better lives if we regard pure patients as having equal
dignity. But maybe the truth isn’t self-evident. And Kass is never that
clear about why we must accord pure patients dignity. Meilaender’s
faith gives him confidence enough that every human life has equally
irreplaceable significance, and so he never has to engage in deliberation
about the dignity of any particular human patient.
So far the evidence is that, not only do most Americans share
Meilaender’s faith, but the results are disastrous when we make public
policy based on skepticism about its truth. The monstrous tyrannies
of the 20th century were all based on the premise that some human
beings exist for others—one race is expendable for another’s benefit,
or today’s individuals can be sacrificed indiscriminately for the perfect
society of the future. And surely we all agree that an undignified
temptation of biotechnology is the engineering or manufacturing of
human beings for the benefit of others—as, for example, sources of
spare parts, or as material for medical research. The undoubted moral
premise of our individualism is that no particular human being exists
merely for others; so our law depends on the thought that each of us
is a dignified end, not a dispensable means.
Dennett’s utility argument actually points to the conclusion that
our humane belief in dignity is useful only if we have faith, with Meilaender,
that it’s really true. An urgent question before us is to what
extent that faith is reasonable apart from real belief in the personal
God of the Bible. Another is to what extent Kass, Meilaender, and
Dennett finally share the same answer to that question. Surely only
Dennett is sanguine about the reasonableness of belief that is not really
true.
Another point of agreement between Dennett and Meilaender
worth emphasizing is that they both defend human dignity as a way
of fending off human degradation. They both write to preserve the