Human Dignity and Bioethics

Two Arguments from Human Dignity | 451
the interests of citizens to have to live in conditions of gross deprivation.
But the fact that having to live in such conditions is contrary
to the interests of citizens is not the reason the Fittingness Argument
provides for the government action required by C. Rather, the reason
for government’s action is the incongruity or lack of “fit” asserted
in (3f.1). In this case, government’s failure to take citizens’ interests
as its reason for action is a failure to be appropriately respectful of
human worth. For if government acknowledges that living in gross
deprivation is bad, but alleviates that bad in order to correct a cosmic
imbalance,* then it is not showing appropriate respect to the citizens
who would otherwise have to endure those conditions. When government
is moved by the incongruity or lack of fit caused by poverty,
rather than by the fact that poverty is bad for the people who suffer
it, government at best treats its citizens as valued objects. It does not
treat them as human agents, as beings capable of action and liable to
suffering. But since a government that treats its citizens as objects
(even as valued objects) rather than as agents is not showing respect
for human dignity, the Fittingness Argument fails. It fails because,
given what is meant by “befit” in (3f.1), (3f.2.1) is false.
IV. The Aristotelian Argument: Initial Statement and
Clarification
The argument from human dignity that I now want to explore promises
to avoid the difficulty of the Fittingness Argument by showing that
respect for human dignity requires government to advance certain
identifiable human interests. It is an argument with some currency
* Joel Feinberg has suggested that ideas about injustice to the cosmos—consisting
in acts and states of affairs which throw the cosmos “out of kilter”—persist in
modern moral consciousness. Feinberg associates these ideas with what he calls
“Platonic justice”; see his “Non-Comparative Justice,” The Philosophical Review 83
(1974): 297-338, pp. 307ff. My own opinion is that what Feinberg calls “Platonic
justice” is one member of a larger family of “Fittingness Views of Justice”; see the
footnote on Nussbaum on pp. 458-459 below. I do not mean to deny Feinberg’s
suggestion about modern moral consciousness. Indeed, I believe my discussion of
commensuration confirms it. But I do question—as I believe Feinberg would—
whether putting the cosmos back in “kilter” is a proper aim of liberal democratic
government.