Human Dignity and Bioethics

388 | David Gelernter
on to the real topic. (But the kids usually do anyway.) I’ll argue here
that Macklin is right to see the religious underpinnings of “dignity,”
but that she (and the Council’s defenders who want to keep dignity
and religion separate) are wrong to think that religious ideas are bad
for a liberal democracy. Modern scholarship suggests that without
religious ideas, there would be no such thing as liberal democracy. 1
But leaving history aside, it seems to me that we can’t even protect
autonomy, much less avoid such horrors as human cloning, without
the support of religion.
A pattern in modern thought: thinkers repeatedly find themselves
wanting the effects of religion without the cause. In former
generations, philosophy tried and repeatedly failed to achieve “religion
within the limits of reason.” It has long since quit that game
and gone home. To most modern thinkers (me included), the game
seems unwinnable and pointless. Yet modern philosophers still find
themselves wanting what they can’t have: religious effects without
religious causes. Unfortunately, there’s no free lunch, and it’s no good
trying to conjure one up by deep thinking.
One way to approach bioethical problems is to think of a foreground
and a background, and “human dignity” as the bridge leading
from one to the other. The foreground is the problem itself: designer
babies, human cloning, the death of Terry Schiavo. (Obviously the
foreground can vary greatly in specificity.) The background is your
ethical system. Most bioethical discussion takes for granted that you
approach such questions like a typical academic philosopher, armed
with a strictly secular “ethics of human rights.” The “ethics of human
duty” is an alternative that is usually (though not always) associated
with Judeo-Christian religion—and unthinkingly dismissed. In
fact the “ethics of human duty” is rarely considered, rarely discussed,
rarely even present in our bioethical debates.
In this informal essay I’ll approach “human dignity” by way of
the background problems of secular versus religious morality, and of
a “morality of rights” versus a “morality of duties,” and I’ll discuss a
few foreground cases. Of course there is no “religious morality” in the
abstract, so I’ll discuss parts of traditional Jewish morality—and try
to explain what makes it, in certain cases, more humane and kindlier
than the modern secular variety.
Finally I’ll argue that erecting the vast intellectual structure of