Human Dignity and Bioethics

The Lived Experience of Human Dignity | 533
community. All who enter the patient’s presence can become complicit
in the patient’s loss of self-worth.
In teaching institutions, students and residents will look to their
clinical teachers for guidance in protecting patient dignity. Clinical
teachers must be aware that arrogance, indifference, and ineptitude
can lead patients to feel alienated and undignified, reduced to lesser
members of the human community. All who enter the presence of
the seriously ill person become accomplices if the patient feels a loss
of dignity. Unconsciously, the members of the health care team thus
can contribute to the patient’s sense of unworthiness.
The need to sensitize physicians and other health professionals is
an urgent one in today’s mechanized experience of illness. All caregivers
now rotate constantly. The patient must constantly re-establish
identity relationships. The preservation of dignity becomes increasingly
more difficult. Physicians must have the humility to recognize
that other health professionals, family, and friends will often be more
sensitive to this predicament.
This latter admonition is highly relevant in teaching institutions.
Students and medical residents must be taught in settings in which
human dignity is expressly addressed. Students will easily learn good
and bad habits. Indifference, ineptitude, and arrogance are transmissible.
Courses designed to teach compassion, intercultural competency,
and the like may help. But, ultimately, students and residents
model their attitudes about patient care on their clinical teachers’
behavior. The same is true of the institutions within which they take
their first steps as clinicians. The virtues of dignity-responsive care
can only be learned in personal and institutional settings that sustain
those virtues.
Dignity in a Post-secular Society
This essay has focused primarily on only one common lived experience
of dignity and indignity. That is because the clinical experience
is, or will be, familiar to everyone either personally or in the lives of
family and friends. Lived experiences of the same kind are encountered
in other professional relationships, e.g., in law, ministry, and
teaching. Even more universally, the experience of dignity is a reality