Human Dignity and Bioethics

490 | Daniel P. Sulmasy, O.F.M.
dignity presented here provides a strong basis for preventing discrimination
against the disabled and for supporting claims of equality of
access to health care for the disabled. Such a conception of dignity
would appear quite useful to bioethics.
Embryonic Stem Cell Research
A currently vexatious issue facing biomedical science is the morality
of using human embryonic stem cells for research. Arguments opposing
this practice on the basis of respect for human dignity have
been vigorously attacked in the bioethics literature as vacuous. Does
the conception of human dignity presented in this essay shed any
light on these arguments?
If there is such a thing as intrinsic value, then, as I have argued, it
is the value something has by virtue of its being the kind of thing that
it is. Intrinsic value inheres in natural kinds, since artifacts have only
attributed, and not intrinsic, value. I defined intrinsic dignity as the
intrinsic value of natural kinds that have, as natural kinds, the capacity
for language, rationality, love, free will, moral agency, creativity,
aesthetic sensibility, and an ability to grasp the finite and the infinite.
These are characteristic features of the human natural kind. Thus, the
human natural kind (at least) has intrinsic dignity.
As I have argued, this value is not based on the active expression
by an individual of any one (or even several) of the particular
characteristics that confer intrinsic dignity on the natural kind as a
whole. I made this argument in two ways. First, I explained that the
extensional logic of natural kinds dictates that one first pick out an
individual as a member of a kind by including it under the extension
provided by one or two representative samples of the kind, backed by
a full understanding of the typical history, the development, and the
law-like generalizations that characterize members of that kind. The
very notion of natural kinds entails acceptance of this “modest” essentialism.
The presence or absence of no single specifiable characteristic
or set of characteristics is sufficient to determine this “essence,”
in all of its modesty. Second, I showed that each of the candidate
characteristics one might suggest, by intensional logic, as the dignityconferring
characteristic, leads to gross inconsistencies when applied