Human Dignity and Bioethics

384 | Diana Schaub
license to “the reciprocal freedom of consenting adults.” She sketches
the limits upon autonomy that follow from the requirement “that
one must respect oneself ‘as an animal being.’” Whereas Nussbaum’s
view seems to be that only government can debase human beings
(by failing to provide the necessary entitlements for developing one’s
capabilities), Shell highlights the possibility of self-degradation and
the Kantian obligation “to treat humanity in oneself, no less than in
others, as an ‘end in itself.’” There would doubtless be prostitutes in
Kant’s world, since human beings fail in their obligations to self and
others, but there could not be the government-enabled sex workers
that Nussbaum approves.
The Kantian bioethics that Shell articulates emphasizes caution,
restraint, and due humility in our treatment of our bodies. But, according
to Shell, these limits may not apply universally. Near the
end of her essay, she suggests that Kant offers a “punctuated account
of human development,” which means that moral standing is not
inherent to all human beings at all stages of life, but rather is an accrued
quality linked to the acquisition of specific faculties—in the
case of Kant, the faculty of moral reasoning. In applying this notion
of accrued moral status to bioethics, Shell indicates that Kant himself
might have regarded even newborns as lacking full moral standing.
While Shell is not prepared to join Kant (and Peter Singer) in
this opinion, she does wonder whether this notion of accrued moral
status might not make embryo-destructive stem cell research permissible.
She herself draws the line of personhood very early at the
developmental moment that the twinning of the embryo is no longer
possible. She argues that the possibility of identical twins from what
was initially one embryo shows that a fully individuated being was
not yet present.
Since neither of us is expert in embryology, let me offer a counterinterpretation
from someone who is. According to Stanford biologist
and Council member William Hurlbut, monozygotic twinning
results from a disruption of normal development that provokes a restoration
of integrity within two distinct trajectories. Hurlbut states
that “twinning is not evidence of the absence of an individual, but
of an extraordinary power of compensatory repair that reflects more
fully the potency of the individual drive to fullness of form.” 2 Twinning
is a profound testament to the presence and the resilience of