Human Dignity and Bioethics

The Religious Character of Human Dignity | 397
unwilling to cede control over the creation of human beings to science
and technology. Can they convincingly explain why not, if “human
dignity” is all they have to work with? Isn’t it fundamentally a
religious impulse (specifically a Judeo-Christian impulse) that drives
many of them? Whatever good thing is at the root of “human dignity,”
scientists can make it better or provide more—at least they can
try!—unless your vision of “human dignity” has no utilitarian handle
to grab hold of at all. Unless you mean that the essence of human-ness
must not be tampered with, no matter what. And isn’t that a Judeo-
Christian idea?
Rights vs. Duties
But I’ve claimed that the “background” and “foreground” ultimately
determine the role played by “human dignity.” Let me explain.
“Background” means our basic approach to ethics; but here we
find two competing alternatives: the antique religious “ethics of
duty” versus the “ethics of rights” that has been assumed by most
thinkers for centuries. Philosophers like to argue that these two
worldviews are complementary. In fact they are contradictory. Each
yields an all-inclusive blueprint for society, with no room for further
contributions.
Granted, it’s convenient to speak of one’s “duty” to help the poor
and one’s “right” of self-defense. No contradiction there. But think it
over and you will see that, by laying out everyone’s duties explicitly,
you lay out everyone’s rights implicitly and vice versa. You have a
right to self-defense—or, to put it differently, a duty to use no violence
except (among other cases) in self-defense. Both formulas reach
the same destination by different routes. By means of an “ethics of
duty,” you shape society as a sculptor carves stone; with an “ethics of
rights,” you shape it as a sculptor models clay. Two different, contradictory
techniques.
The ethics of duty originated in Judeo-Christianity, the ethics of
rights in Roman jurisprudence. The Hebrew tradition knows about
rights—but only in the context of covenants, where two parties each
acquire rights and responsibilities simultaneously.
A right ordinarily “confers an advantageous position,” to put it