Human Dignity and Bioethics

340 | Susan M. Shell
Attention to our necessary ways of orienting ourselves in the
world can help us to avoid certain absurdities to which certain “liberal”
models of the self are otherwise all too prone. The sharp distinction
between “persons” and “things” that liberalism encourages can,
if wrongly applied, lead either to treatment of one’s own body and
its parts as if they were as “alienable” as, say, a suit of clothes (as in
Nip/Tuck, a popular satire on the plastic surgery industry) or, alternatively,
to confusion of the body’s surface boundaries with those
of self-hood proper (as in Andrea Dworkin’s portrayal of the female
body as a fortress that is, or ought to be, literally impregnable).
In the first case, one may be driven to regard such arrangements
as the sale of body parts or maternal surrogacy as no more problematic
than any other exchange of goods or services. But even the
fiercest champions of untrammeled market freedom in such areas
are sometimes brought up short by due recognition of the human
consequences—consequences that would ultimately make markets
as such impossible. 14 A recent example: our unease with the idea of
transplanting faces, even to restore healthy function rather than for
the sake of aesthetic “enhancement.” As the very term “person” (derived
from persona, the Latin word for “mask”) suggests, the relation
between individual identity and bodily appearance—especially the
appearance of one’s face—is neither accidental, on the one hand, nor
perfectly straightforward on the other. Eighteenth-century physiognomists
may have exaggerated the extent to which our inner character
can be read in our faces; but that there is some reciprocal relation
and effect seems undeniable. The face is a mask that both reveals us
and permits us to hide, just as actors’ masks allow them to assume, in
highly stylized ways, identities other than their own. Still, a world in
which faces, and the peculiar expressions that accompany them, were
as exchangeable as hats does not seem to be one in which human life
as we know it could easily exist.
In the second, admittedly rarer case, the body and the self become
confused in such a way as equally to challenge the possibility of
human life. In Dworkin’s words:
There is a never real privacy of the body that can co-exist with
intercourse: with being entered.… The thrusting is persistent
invasion. She is opened up, split down the center. She is