Human Dignity and Bioethics

The Religious Character of Human Dignity | 405
In any event, modern life is secularized, and that can’t be undone.
But Americans are not secularized. Many are Christian (some actively
Christian); a few are actively Jewish.
Bioethics touches every life. This field can’t possibly be allowed to
develop in the secular ghetto where modern intellectuals lives. Bioethics
needs Judeo-Christian ideas: must understand human sanctity
and not just dignity, must understand the world of duties and not
only of rights. Even atheists might gain from a broader, more tolerant,
more multi-cultural approach to the hard questions of the human
spirit.
Notes
1
See Michael Novak, On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the
American Founding (San Francisco, California: Encounter, 2002); Jonathan Jacobs,
“Return to the Sources: Political Hebraism and the Making of Modern Politics,”
Hebraic Political Studies, volume 1, number 3 (Spring 2006), pp. 328-342; Fania
Oz-Salzberger, “The Political Thought of John Locke and the Significance of Political
Hebraism,” Hebraic Political Studies, volume 1, number 5 (Fall 2006), pp.
568-592.
2
Simon Blackburn, Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003).
3
Abraham Lincoln, “Reply to Loyal Colored People of Baltimore upon Presentation
of a Bible,” September 7, 1864 in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P.
Basler (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1953), volume 7, p.
543.
4
Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
5
Cited in A Rabbinic Anthology, ed. Claude J. G. Montefiore and Herbert M. J.
Loewe (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1960).
6
Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (New York: Holt,
2003).