Human Dignity and Bioethics

448 | Paul Weithman
entitlement by alleging an imperative—a “must”—in (3f.2).
This way of reading the argument, with the impersonal “must,”
seems to suggest that the agents on whom the duty falls must avert
the bad alleged in (3f.1) because by (3f.2) that bad must be averted.
But this is surely a mistake. The badness of a state of affairs does
not generate a free-floating imperative which explains why agents
are obliged to avert it. Rather, if some bad state of affairs must be
averted, it is surely because some agent or agents—maybe even all
agents—have a duty to avert it. So to see whether the move from
(3f.1) to the entitlement is justified, we need to see whose duty that
is and where the duty comes from.
Because I began by talking about the EU Charter and the UN
Declaration (which are signed by governments) and the German Basic
Law (which establishes a government), I shall assume that the agents
on whom the duty falls are governments. It falls to governments to
avert the bad in question. Moreover, the proponent of the Fittingness
Argument thinks it falls to government to avert that bad because
government is supposed to be appropriately responsive to or respectful
of the worth of human beings. So when the proponent of that
argument asserts (3f), I believe that what he means is not (3f.1) and
(3f.2), but rather (3f.1) together with:
(3f.2.1) The bad of a human being’s having to live in conditions
of gross material deprivation is one that government
must avert if it is to be appropriately respectful of human
worth.
(3f.2.2) Government must be appropriately respectful of human
worth.
(3f.2.3) So the bad of a human being’s having to live in conditions
of gross material deprivation is one that government
must avert.
With this elaboration of (3f) in hand, it is possible to elaborate the
initial statement of the Fittingness Argument.