Human Dignity and Bioethics

496 | Daniel P. Sulmasy, O.F.M.
that characterizes us as a kind is threatened.
A theory of dignity that explains the common intuition that the
bringing to birth of a cloned human being would be a transgression
against dignity is a robust theory of dignity. This suggests that the
concept of dignity is not irrelevant to bioethics but, rather, extremely
important.
The Care of Persons Suffering from Post-coma
Unresponsiveness
The proper care of persons suffering from the Permanent Vegetative
State and related neurological conditions has become a highly contentious
bioethical topic in the Western world. Even the name of
the condition has become a matter of controversy. Although a good
biologist or philosopher who has studied Aristotle knows that the
term “vegetative” is purely descriptive and not pejorative, many persons,
sadly, have abused the term and have called patients who suffer
from the condition “vegetables.” Because of this, the Australian term,
“post-coma unresponsiveness” may be the most descriptive name one
can use for this condition and may also be the least liable to misinterpretation.
42 Accordingly, “post-coma unresponsiveness” is the term I
will use to describe the condition of persons who initially become comatose
after anoxic or traumatic brain injury, but gradually develop
into a state in which they are able to open their eyes, have intact brain
stem functions and are able to breathe and exhibit sleep-wake cycles,
but never recover signs of cognitive awareness or conscious interaction
with their environments.
One line of argument in bioethics suggests that such individuals
have lost all dignity and therefore should either be euthanized, experimented
on, or denied access to life-prolonging therapies. The conception
of dignity presented in this essay provides a basis for understanding
that this line of argument cannot be sustained. That is because such
arguments are based solely on an attributed sense of dignity.
Human beings suffering from post-coma unresponsiveness (PCU)
have not undergone an ontological change. Such patients have not
become some other kind of thing. We pick them out as members
of the human natural kind as a precondition for our judgment that