Human Dignity and Bioethics

Commentary on Meilaender and Dennett | 283
qualities that distinguish human beings from their assault by modern
science and potentially by biotechnology. Even Dennett seems to
write to preserve the real existence of beings capable of believing and
acting in a dignified way from biotechnology that would, say, suppress
those parts of the brain that make dignity indispensable.
Both of our extremists are open to the criticism that, when formulating
public policy, Americans have always thought in terms of
protecting rights, not dignity. Because we can speak so clearly and
certainly of rights, why should we employ a term as murky—as controversial
and as self-righteous—as dignity? There are actually good
reasons to think of dignity as at least politically useless. When Leon
Kass wrote of “Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity,” it can be
argued, he was imposing upon our country a needlessly innovative
and contentious idea. According to Diana Schaub, our political community
is sufficiently formed by our concern with equal rights, and
dignity—which is necessarily unequal—should remain a private or
personal goal.
Our need to speak of dignity, I think, comes from reflection on
our experiences of the 20th and 21st centuries. What the ideologydriven,
totalitarian regimes of the 20th century did to human beings
was a lot worse than merely violating rights. The Nazis and the Communists
were at war against the very existence of beings capable of
experiencing the dignity of human individuality, of (as the dissidents
Solzhenitsyn, John Paul II and Havel wrote) living responsibly in
light of the truth. It’s in the courageous and truthful thought and
action of these dissidents that we find evidence of dignity that is trivialized
by the view that they were merely exercising their rights. And
in the 21st century, as Kass has shown, biotechnology could actually
provide us with ways of changing our nature in undignified ways that
would promise to maximize our comfort, security, and happiness.
Our spirit of resistance to such changes in our nature surely will be
insufficiently animated by the ambiguous phrase, “natural rights.”
I have to add that it may show a lack of faith—or it may just be
unrealistic—to believe that we are capable of making ourselves anything
other than beings with dignity. Both totalitarian and biotechnological
efforts to eradicate those aspects of our nature that make us dignified
beings—that make us stuck with virtue to live well with what
we can’t help but know—are, as far as I can tell, doomed to fail.