Human Dignity and Bioethics

Kant’s Concept of Human Dignity | 337
further justification. Every human being, in other words, naturally
regards himself as his own center of reference, in terms of which all
other goods express their value. Humanity, one might say (echoing
Nietzsche) is the natural capacity of a being to think in terms of
value—a capacity, so far as we know, that belongs to man alone of all
earthly creatures. But humanity, as the “subjective” side of “rational
nature,” also points beyond itself. Man can regard his own existence
as something that has objective value only through recognition of a
law that applies equally to others. 12 Only to the extent that he gives
full weight to that law (by “respecting humanity”) can he rationally
regard his own existence as worthy of “esteem.” Humanity is thus the
capacity that both enables us to think in terms of value at all and orients
us toward (without physically necessitating) full-fledged moral
autonomy—and its realm of objective worth or dignity.* Respect and
esteem are at once distinct and intrinsically related to one another.
This consideration helps explain Kant’s otherwise puzzling separation,
in Religion within the Boundaries of Bare Reason, of “reason”
from moral personality proper. Kant there asks us to imagine our human
“endowments” as three-fold: physical, “human” (or “rational” in
a strictly instrumental sense) and moral. A rational animal without a
conscience—without an awareness, however primitive, of the moral
law—is a thinkable possibility; but it is not us. Even human infants,
in their crying—counterpurposive, Kant thinks, if one regards the
end of humanity to be mere physical survival—“immediately announce”
their “claim to freedom (an idea possessed by no other animal).”
Although absent in the newborn, that idea is already present
in some way by the time infants are capable of “crying”:
The newborn child certainly cannot have this outlook. But
the tears that accompany his screaming a few months after
birth reveal that his feeling of uneasiness comes, not from
physical pain, but from an obscure idea (or a representation
analogous to it) of freedom and its hindrance, injustice; they
express a kind of exasperation when he tries to approach certain
objects or merely to change his general position, and
* In the Metaphysics of Morals Kant defines humanity as “the capacity to set oneself
an end—any end whatever,” a capacity unique to rational beings. See Metaphysics of
Morals 6: 392; translation in Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. Gregor, pp. 522-23.