Human Dignity and Bioethics

Kant’s Concept of Human Dignity | 343
sort of reasoning we do with regard to health and sickness upward.
Pleasure and pain serve as rough yet indispensable guides to health
and illness. Pain and pleasure regulate the lives of animals instinctively.
Human beings, in our capacity as calculative reasoners, can
override the immediate demands of pain and pleasure with a view to
maximizing our physical well-being deliberatively. By analogy, human
beings can and should orient themselves with a view to moral
health, or the subordination of physical well-being to a higher rational
purpose. 18 Such an ideal of “moral” or “spiritual” life—an ideal
that implies the complete organization of our physical, rationally
calculative and moral being—is, admittedly, a construction on our
part, that may or may not correspond to anything that we can (fully)
realize. But it is not an arbitrary ideal nor one, in Kant’s view, toward
which we can remain indifferent. And it is an ideal whose formality
can encompass, though not from their own point of view replace,
moral and religious aspirations of a more traditional sort.
Kant and Bioethics
How might such pragmatically informed reflections bear on contemporary
questions of bioethics? Without entering fully into the
many complexities involved, a few guiding principles can be educed.
First, there is a certain teleological structure to human life that is
anchored, at the lower end, by our primary experience of ourselves
as worldly agents. By virtue of that experience, we are directed, first,
toward physical well-being and, second, by demands upon others
and ourselves that can be regulatively understood as the appearance
in the world of a higher principle of life. Duties toward oneself seek a
combination of physical and moral self-preservation that permits this
higher principle to “take root.”
Second, organized beings, though susceptible to scientific study,
cannot in principle be fully comprehended. No Newton, as Kant
famously put it, will ever arise who can explain a blade of grass. 19
By this Kant does not mean that biological inquiry cannot progress
indefinitely, but rather that we are compelled to understand ourselves
and, by analogy, all other living organisms in ways that ultimately
transcend efficient causation. A physician or researcher informed by