Human Dignity and Bioethics

Kant’s Concept of Human Dignity | 339
that enables us to reason leads us to make demands upon the world
that ultimately devolve upon ourselves if “only we are rationally consistent.”
Our “dignity” ultimately derives from our capacity to act
upon the dictates of our own reason—i.e., from our autonomy as
moral agents. The objective value that we claim is one that we ourselves
cannot take to be rational, and hence cannot take seriously,
unless we grant it to others who are similarly organized.
As this brief and inadequate sketch suggests, Kant’s moral anthropology,
broadly construed, is well positioned to support a regime
of individual rights, or of “equal recognition,” as Hegel will later call
it. And this, indeed, is the use to which Kant is most often put, as we
have seen, in today’s bioethical debates. But “humanity,” I am claiming,
means more for Kant than the reciprocal freedom of consenting
adults (or those who might become or might once have been so); it
also imposes limits on the uses to which one may put one’s own capacities.
What, then, are those limits?
Here the story grows more complicated, as Kant himself admits.
Still, certain fundamental principles are clear enough. In regarding
ourselves as practical worldly agents—in “looking out” upon the
world from a pragmatic standpoint—we cannot help thinking teleologically
about our own capacities. Contrary to some contemporary
accounts of liberal “self-ownership,” our bodies are not things we
own, items that are indistinguishable, in principle, from other sorts
of alienable property. As the site of our own worldly agency, our
bodies are at once more emphatically and irreducibly our own than
any merely worldly “thing” and less available to manipulation by our
arbitrary will. Certain organic necessities cannot be overcome, nor
could we wish to do so without seeking to undermine basic feelings
(like the difference between left and right, or between pain and pleasure)
by which we orient ourselves. Such indispensable feelings, one
could say, are the necessary polestars of living beings like ourselves
who are (also) self-aware. The pleasant will always affect us differently
than the painful, our left foot cannot become our right one. Of
course, one can strive to render oneself relatively indifferent to both
pain and pleasure; or to compensate, by strengthening one foot, for
weakness in the other. But such orienting feelings remain, at least so
long as we are in that rough state of organic functionality and wellness
that we associate with human sanity.