Human Dignity and Bioethics

Defending Human Dignity | 301
in accepting risks and discomforts, his philanthropic desire to contribute
to a worthy cause, and his generosity of time and trouble in
embracing activities from which he will receive no direct benefit.
In these domains of clinical medicine and research involving
human subjects, appeals to human dignity, while tacitly employing
an ideal of proper treatment and respect, function explicitly and
mainly as bulwarks against abuse: patients should not be reduced
to “thing-hood” or treated as mere bodies; research subjects should
not be utilized as mere means or treated only as experimental animals.
This “negative” function of the concept of human dignity in
these domains makes perfect sense, inasmuch as it is intended—and
needed—to restrain the strong in their dealings with the weak. It
makes even more sense once we remember the origins of modern
biomedical ethics: a concern for human dignity hovers over all of
modern biomedical ethics owing to the world’s horror at the Nazi
atrocities, atrocities in which German scientists and German doctors
were deeply implicated. They more than lent a hand with eugenic
sterilization, barbaric human experimentation, and mass extermination
of the “unfit”—all undertaken, mind you, in order to produce “a
more perfect human.” The rise to prominence of the idea of “human
dignity” in post-World-War-II Europe, expressed in the laws of many
nations and especially in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, was surely intended to ensure that no human beings
should ever again be so abused, degraded, and dehumanized—and,
of course, annihilated.
But a more robust notion of human dignity is needed when we
turn from these traditional domains of medical ethics to the moral
challenges raised by new biotechnological powers and the novel purposes
to which they are being put, and when we turn from concerns
with abuse of power that the strong inflict upon the weak to concerns
with ethically dubious uses of powers that the strong—indeed, most
of us—will choose to exercise for and on ourselves. Our desires for a
better life do not end with health, and the uses of biotechnology are
not limited to therapy. Its powers to alter the workings of body and
mind are attractive not only to the sick and suffering, but to everyone
who desires to look younger, perform better, feel happier, or become
more “perfect.”
We have already entered the age of biotechnical enhancement: