Human Dignity and Bioethics

292 | Diana Schaub
through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus,
trial by jury, and the English common law find their
most famous expression in the American Declaration of
Independence. 10
Churchill, of course, was viewing these regimes from the outside.
One might argue that those whom Lawler calls “the great dissident
opponents” experienced a deeper truth, namely that Hitler and Stalin
weren’t just violating rights but “were at war against the being capable
of experiencing dignity.” If so, the ideologues were notably unsuccessful,
since they brought some, at least, of their victims not to the
depths of dehumanization but to the depths of wisdom and humane
insight. The American experience, also, offers examples of individuals
who felt the full effects of soul-destroying tyranny and yet emerged
fortified in spirit. Frederick Douglass is one of the great dissidents.
Like the Founders and Lincoln, Douglass very rarely employed the
word “dignity.” I suspect that Frederick Douglass would have had
the language to denounce fascism and communism just as he had
the language to denounce the slaveocracy, with nary a mention of
dignity. As Lawler also notes, these monstrous offenses—which “can’t
be described as mere violations of rights”—were perpetrated by ideologists
who denied the existence of individual rights. Violations of
rights are never “mere.” It may be that the surest route to attain and
sustain human dignity is through the defense of human rights. While
Douglass didn’t speak of dignity, his every action displayed and demonstrated
it.
Our contemporary tendency to bandy the word about is an ominous
sign that we no longer agree about its content. Because we no
longer share what Meilaender calls a “vision of what it means to be
human,” perhaps we are obliged to be more explicit than in the past
about the conditions and limits of human dignity. As Meilaender
details so well in the final section of his paper, the Council has done
valuable work in articulating an anthropological vision (as opposed
to a transhumanist vision), in its discussions both of characteristically
human procreation and of superior human performance (athletic
and other). I don’t know whether an anthropology is necessary to
being human, but if a science of man can help either to keep us men
or make us good men I’m all for it.