Human Dignity and Bioethics

Defending Human Dignity | 315
passions—hope, wonder, trust, love, sympathy, gratitude, awe, and
reverence for the divine. No account of the dignity of being human is
worth its salt without them. And no technologically driven world of
the future that fails to safeguard the dignity of everyday life deserves
our assent.
Basic Human Dignity: The Dignity of Human Being
The humanity that shines forth in human beings, whether in the great
or in the small, is always something that arouses our admiration and
our respect. Even when universalized, it retains the character of excellence
or worthiness. Yet there are partisans of human dignity who
will have none of these judgments of excellence or worth. Even when
they gladly acknowledge the difference between virtue and vice, they
are loath to say that one person lives a life more worthy than another.
They insist that human dignity, rightly understood, is something all
human beings—the base as well as the noble, the wicked as well as
the righteous—enjoy equally, simply by virtue of their human being.*
Why do they do so, and what can we make of this claim?
To begin with, they assert the equal dignity of every human being
for certain express purposes, limited ones to be sure, but crucial for
any decent society: to prevent the display of contempt, and especially
“capital” contempt with lethal consequences, for those who do not
“measure up.” They seek to insure a solid level of human worth that
no one can deny to any fellow human being; they wish to lean against
the widespread tendency to treat the foreigner and the enemy, the
misfit and the deviant, or the demented and the disabled as less human
or less worthy than oneself—and especially as unworthy of basic
respect and continued existence. And, following the unspeakable
horrors perpetrated in the 20th century, they wish at the very least
to provide a moral barrier against the liquidation of human beings—
whether in genocide or in euthanasia—often practiced by those who
act in the name of their own sense of superior worth.
But even granting the soundness of the purpose—which I embrace
wholeheartedly and without reservation—asserting that we all
* See, for example, the essay by Gilbert Meilaender in this volume.