Human Dignity and Bioethics

Human Dignity and Respect for Persons | 33
in need of an account of humanity more probing and comprehensive
than that which undergirds the now-prevalent theories of ethical
justification. The work of the President’s Council—and especially its
explorations of human dignity, including the present volume—can
be understood as a response to that need.
I shall conclude with a few more comparisons and a prediction.
Previously, I highlighted the place of the Belmont Report in the work
of the National Commission: it was the Commission’s last report and
was in part a retrospective endeavor, an effort to reflect back on and
clarify the ethical reasoning, implicit and explicit, in the Commission’s
previously published, “problem-specific” reports. But Belmont
was also a prospective endeavor, attempting to prescribe a needed
ethical framework for future human subjects research. This volume
exhibits a similarly bifocal perspective. Some of its essays look back
to older sources of wisdom about human dignity or attempt to explicate
invocations of human dignity in the published reports of the
President’s Council; while others have a more prospective trajectory,
seeking to stimulate bioethical inquiry, and propelling it forward in
relatively unexplored directions.
For an American readership, some of these explorations may
seem rather novel. Unlike the principles enunciated in the Belmont
Report, the concept of human dignity is not derived from a common
morality of American vintage. The story of dignity’s origins
and evolution is a complex one, with roots in the Biblical account of
human creation as well as in ancient Stoicism and the philosophy of
Immanuel Kant, among other sources. To appreciate this complexity
and the challenges it poses for dignity as a bioethical concept,
one could do no better than read the introductory essay by Adam
Schulman, the project director and co-editor of this volume. What
is at issue here, however, is the significance of these facts about the
origins and development of the concept of human dignity, especially
about its distinctly un-American beginnings. Certainly, any
national forum in public bioethics should be knowledgeable about
and responsive to the unique intellectual and political traditions of
the nation it serves. But if its inquiries are to be rigorously fundamental,
it will necessarily also look beyond these traditions for an
understanding of humanity that is as broad as it is deep. After all,
the urgent and fundamental questions at the heart of bioethics do