Human Dignity and Bioethics

Commentary on Meilaender and Lawler| 287
mean to suggest that Lincoln would have denied sustenance to the
young or the elderly or the sick. Lincoln was attacking the injustice
of slave labor, and his arguments were marshaled accordingly. I have
no doubt that Lincoln would defend the right to life as vigorously as
he defended the right to liberty. We have evidence of his capacious
humanity in the closing lines of the Second Inaugural when he calls
on Americans “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and
for his widow, and his orphan.”
The example of Lincoln leads me to think that we have a model
for how to combine and celebrate both the respects in which human
beings are equal and the respects in which they are unequal. One
need not imperil the other. Indeed, the life of Lincoln—a superior
man who devoted and sacrificed his life to the teaching of equality—
reminds us that we can’t have one without the other. We shouldn’t
lose sight of the success of the American Founders, among whom I
include Lincoln, in combining the egalitarian and the inegalitarian.
They didn’t seem to struggle with it as we do. They were a happy
amalgam: Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian Lockeans. Whether this
synthesis coheres in theory or not, perhaps we need to take it more
seriously as a basis for sound policy guidance
Meilaender asserts that there are two places where judgments of
individual worth should not be given any scope: at the threshold
of death and participation in human society. Meilaender seems to
say these are absolutes. He quotes Kierkegaard approvingly: “If you
save a person’s life in the dark, thinking that it is a friend—but it
was the neighbor—this is no mistake.” I can imagine scenarios in
which it might have been a very big mistake: what if your neighbor
also happened to be your enemy and you happened to have been
on a nighttime reconnaissance mission? Kierkegaard’s statement is
radically apolitical; it abstracts entirely from the distinction between
friend and foe. Does the political fact that some neighbors are friends
and allies while others are deadly and inveterate foes require that individuals
in authority be entrusted with the power of life and death
over other individuals? Or are the claims of “the neighbor” indeed
absolute? If human judgments have no place at the threshold of
death does that require not only opposition to the death penalty but
thoroughgoing pacifism as well?
This question points back to the striking contrast between St.