Human Dignity and Bioethics

466 | Paul Weithman
Notes
1
I am grateful to Elizabeth Anderson and Robert Audi for helpful comments on
an earlier draft.
2
See www.un.org/Overview/rights.html.
3
The Charter is available via a link at www.europarl.europa.eu/charter/default_
en.htm.
4
Emphasis added; for an English translation of the Basic Law, see www.iuscomp.
org/gla/statutes/GG.htm.
5
Ruth Macklin, “Dignity is a Useless Concept,” British Medical Journal 327
(2003): 1419-1420.
6
See, for example, Louis Dupré and William O’Neill, SJ, “Social Structures and
Structural Ethics,” The Review of Politics 51 (1989): 327-344, especially pp. 336
and 342.
7
See Jacques Maritain, The Person and the Common Good (Notre Dame, Indiana:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), trans. John J. Fitzgerald, p. 13: “Our desire
is to make clear the personalism rooted in the doctrine of St. Thomas and to
separate, at the very outset, a social philosophy centered in the dignity of the human
person from every social philosophy centered in the primacy of the individual
and the private good.”
8
This paragraph summarizes a line of criticism pursued in detail in Martha Nussbaum,
Frontiers of Justice (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,
2006).
9
The President’s Council on Bioethics, Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An
Ethical Inquiry (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2002), p. 89;
Taking Care: Ethical Caregiving in Our Aging Society (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office, 2005), p. 104.
10
See Taking Care, pp. 103, 126, 127, 129.
11
The President’s Council on Bioethics, Being Human: Readings from the President’s
Council on Bioethics (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2003),
introduction to chapter 10.
12
See Taking Care, p. x.
13
Human Cloning and Human Dignity, p. 87; The President’s Council on Bioethics,
Monitoring Stem Cell Research (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office,
2004), p. 92.
14
The President’s Council on Bioethics, Alternative Sources of Human Pluripotent
Stem Cells: A White Paper (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2005),
p. 43; Human Cloning and Human Dignity, p. ix.
15
Human Cloning and Human Dignity, p. 14.
16
The President’s Council on Bioethics, Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit
of Happiness (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2003), p. 103.
17
Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, p. 44 (emphasis added). I hasten to add
that, as will be apparent in the next section, I do not take Nussbaum to be a proponent
of the Fittingness Argument. The quotation here is simply a prominent and