Human Dignity and Bioethics

316 | Leon R. Kass
have “equal dignity” does not, by itself, make it so. Mere assertion
will not convince the skeptic nor refute the deniers of human dignity.
We need to examine the grounds for thinking that all human
beings—dignified or not in their conduct—actually have, or should
be treated as if they had, full and equal human dignity.
The first—and perhaps best—ground remains practical and political,
not theoretical and ontological. If you or your government (or
my doctor or health maintenance organization) wants to claim that
I am, for reasons of race or ethnicity or disability or dementia, subhuman,
or at least not your equal in humanity, and, further, if you
mean to justify harming or neglecting me on the basis of that claim,
the assertion of universal human dignity exists to get in your way.
The burden of proof shifts to you, to show why I am not humanly
speaking your equal: you must prove why you are entitled to put a
saddle and bridle on me and ride me like a horse, or to deny me the
bread that I have earned with the sweat of my brow, or to dispatch
me from this world because I lead a subhuman existence. You will,
in fact, face an impossible task: you will be unable to prove that
you possess God-like knowledge of the worth of individual souls or
carry the proper scale of human worth for finding me insufficiently
“weighty” to deserve to continue to breathe the air. In this approach
to grounding basic human dignity, I offer not a metaphysically based
proof but a rhetorically effective demonstration—shown precisely by
my asserting my equal dignity—that I, like you, am a somebody, like
you born of woman and destined to die, like you a member of the
human species each of whose members knows from the inside the
goodness of his own life and liberty.
Mention of life and liberty reminds us that, for Americans as
Americans, the doctrine of human equality and equal humanity has
its most famous and noblest expression in the Declaration of Independence.
It is, in fact, to the principles of the Declaration that
some people repair in seeking to ground the dignity of human being,
and it makes some sense to try to do so. We Americans, in declaring
ourselves a separate people, began by asserting our belief in the
self-evident truth, “That all men are created equal.” However human
beings may differ in talent, accomplishment, social station, race, or
religion, they are, according to the Declaration, self-evidently equal,
at least in this: “That they are endowed by their Creator with certain