Human Dignity and Bioethics

The Religious Character of Human Dignity | 399
share the same duties. (Some have argued that police duties must be
forbidden to the public—but that’s a different question.)
Does the public actually care about any duties except mandatory
legal ones? Surely it doesn’t care about “philosophical duties”?
But “Uncle Sam wants you for the United States Army” was a highly
successful recruiting poster. When vague desiderata are translated
into concrete duties—“only you can prevent forest fires”—the public
takes note.
Of course we could say that “granting an individual some right
implies imposing on the whole public or its representatives a corresponding
duty.” True. But the idea that the public will draw a conclusion
just because the inference is logically possible is one of the great
absurdities of academic philosophy. The public has other things to
do than sift through known propositions looking for inferences to
draw.
The Foreground of Human Dignity
I’ve now discussed two of the “background” questions pertaining to
human dignity—secular versus religious morality, and a “morality of
rights” versus a “morality of duties”; on to a few cases.
First, some passages from the Bible and the Talmud that deal
with treatment of the sick, the weak, the unprotected—the sort of
problem bioethics frequently deals with. Then some modern problems
suggested by bioethics directly.
In Judaism as in Christianity, the basis for all assertions regarding
the proper treatment of our fellow men are the verses in which man
is said to be created in the image of God. “And God said, Let us make
man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26, cf. 5:1-3 and
9:5-7). Judaism is a system of duties imposed on the Jewish people.
Many deal with the treatment of fellow human beings. To give some
idea of the character of these duties, I cite the Talmud and other classic
rabbinic writings—which play roughly the same role in Judaism
as the New Testament does in Christianity. (You can no more understand
Judaism without the Talmud than you can Christianity without
the New Testament. In fact the Talmud emerged from roughly
the same community during roughly the same period as the New