Human Dignity and Bioethics

Kant’s Concept of Human Dignity | 345
injunction—do not damage the functioning of the whole for the
sake of a lesser and/or only partial good—remains.
There is a further way in which Kant’s framework can be brought
to bear on bioethical issues. From a strictly Kantian perspective, only
duties of right are legally enforceable. Breaches of right (as distinguished
from ethics) either violate the rights of other human beings
or violate positive laws that are duly enacted to protect them. The
state may certainly discourage unethical activities—e.g., by not granting
licenses to doctors who fail to meet certain ethical standards—
but it cannot punish them, unless they involve breaches to right (e.g.,
practicing medicine without a legal license to do so).
Current federal policy of withholding funding for certain medical
procedures and kinds of scientific research that are nonetheless
legal calls to mind this Kantian distinction between law and ethics.
Present federal policy is designed to discourage an activity that many
regard as ethically wrong but that the state cannot lawfully prevent,
at least given the current political consensus. According to the weight
of that consensus, destruction of an embryo for the sake of in vitro
fertilization, or to conduct scientific inquiry into medical potential
of stem cells, is not murder, nor should it otherwise constitute a legal
crime. Still, in the view of many it is at least morally problematic and
in the view of some ought in fact to be illegal.
In the remainder of this paper I should like briefly to consider
how Kant’s concept of human dignity might shed light on embryonic
stem cell research and the political and moral controversy surrounding
it. Here two issues come immediately to the fore: the ethical permissibility
of allowing one’s genetic material to be so used; and the
legal or ethical permissibility of damaging or destroying the embryo
for purposes of biological (medical) research.
On the first point (and without considering the moral status of
the embryo as such): use of one’s faculties should not flagrantly contradict
its natural organic function, except in cases where a higher
purpose (such as a desire to help others) is involved. This supports our
ordinary moral intuition that donation of an organ may be permissible
where its sale is not. To be sure, faculties related to generation
have a peculiar ethical complexity, given the special moral and legal
relations to which they may, and normally do, give rise. Extraction
of genetic material—for purposes of enhancing one’s own fertility or