Human Dignity and Bioethics

Defending Human Dignity | 321
being appears to be shifting in the direction of the vertical scale of
being (more and less) actually and actively human.
Having now come at human dignity from two directions—beginning
the first time from the dignity of flourishing humanity at its
heroic peak, and beginning the second time from the dignity of human
life at its primordial level of mere existence—we note a curious
coincidence: the more “aristocratic” account could not help but be
universalized and democratized, once we learned how to find virtue
and read worthiness in the doings of everyday life; and the more
“egalitarian” account could not help but introduce standards of particular
excellences, once we were forced to specify what it is about human
beings that gives them special dignity. This convergence of the
two accounts invites the suggestion that the two aspects of dignity
actually have something to do with one another, indeed, that they
may be mutually implicated and interdependent. The final section
of this paper briefly offers several suggestions as to how and why this
might be true.
The Dignity of Being “In-Between”: Human
Aspiration, Transcendent Possibilities
Let me suggest three aspects of the relationship between the dignity of
human being and the dignity of being human: mutual dependence;
the ground of human aspiration; and intimations of transcendence.
First, the (lower) dignity of human being and the (higher) dignity
of being human are mutually interdependent, but in different ways.
The flourishing of human possibility—in each of its many admirable
forms—depends absolutely on active human vitality, that is, on the
goodness and worth of life as such. The humanly high depends for its
very existence on the humanly low, on the mere existence and wellworking
of the enlivened human body. One image for this relation
of dependence is that between ceiling and floor: no floor, no ceiling.*
But the architectural comparison is misleading, for it suggests independent
and separate “structures” piled one atop the other. Instead,
* I have myself used half of such an image, in speaking about “basic” dignity, the
dignity of the base or foundation, though the counter-pole I have employed, “full
dignity,” is not architectural.