Human Dignity and Bioethics

The Religious Character of Human Dignity | 403
good is it to stay alive if you are comatose, suffering; blind? Could
Milton possibly have been right when he told us, in On his blindness,
that “they also serve who only stand and wait?” Could Shakespeare
have been right when, in one of the most extraordinary passages in
Lear, Gloucester’s loving son says to him (after Gloucester has been
cruelly abused, tormented and blinded), “Thy life’s a miracle!”?
To remain alive and serve God and man the best you can when
you really want life to be over is profoundly inspiring—to man and
(probably) to God. But what about a Terry Schiavo, evidently unable
to do anything? She was indeed able to do something—maybe
only one thing, but maybe the most important. She was able to inspire
love. And when the topic is love, we need all the education we
can get. “The Torah for its own sake is a law of love” (Sukkah 49b).
(When the Talmud insists that one must grapple with Torah for its
own sake, it foreshadows Kant’s insistence that duty done for its own
sake equals human freedom. In Judaism you achieve sanctity—in
Kant freedom—by doing your duty simply to do it.)
Consider two of the horrors of human cloning and “designer
babies.” Any technology gets better; children of parents who order
up the smartest possible babies in year n will easily be outclassed by
younger children whose parents do the same ten years later (while
probably paying a lot less for much spiffier models). Designer children
will grow obsolete, just like PCs. (Bill McKibben discusses this
possibility in Enough. 6 )
Here’s an even more horrifying possibility. I’ve heard and read
several times (on cable TV and in ordinary newspapers) this justification
for human cloning: consider parents whose child has contracted
a fatal disease or been killed in an accident. Those parents could use
tissue from the doomed or dead child to clone an exact duplicate—
which would make the loss of the original less hard to bear.
But imagine the thoughts of the doomed original. “I’m sick
and dying, but my parents have no need to grieve too much. Do
they even need to grieve at all? Before long I’ll be replaced by an
exact duplicate, and life will carry on exactly as before, for everyone
except me.”
“Someone else will wear my clothes, sit at my place, speak my
lines and impersonate me; he will make people believe I am still alive.
Everyone will enjoy the performance—but I won’t.”