Human Dignity and Bioethics

68 | Robert P. Kraynak
higher moral law in the nature and dignity of man, even though
there is nothing wrong, from a Darwinian perspective, with the
strong dominating the weak or the “survival of the fittest.” What is
missing in Dennett is the humility to acknowledge that he assumes
an essential difference between humans and animals based on something
like a rational soul, even though he reduces man to accidental
evolutionary forces. When the materialist conception makes morality
impossible, he turns to notions of dignity that are unsupported
by his cosmology and says, “there is a huge difference between our
minds and the minds of other species, enough even to make a moral
difference.” 13 Thus, he implicitly embraces a dualism of substances
(matter vs. mind or nature vs. freedom) that divides humanity into
two orders of causality which cannot interact except by external mastery.
This actually exaggerates human dignity by making man the
master of the universe, possessing a “super-soul” with creative will
and infinite worth. The narrowness of materialism and the incoherence
of dualism should lead us to rethink the problem with greater
intellectual humility.
Classical Greek Philosophy: Man as an Embodied
Rational Soul
Scientific materialism is untenable, I have argued, because it tries to
banish the soul as a basis for human dignity but smuggles it back in
by various strategies. Materialists also deny a hierarchy of being in
the universe, but they finally admit that man is “higher” than other
animals because of human reason and embrace a higher moral law
directed to an objective human good. These contradictions should
awaken an interest in classical Greek philosophy and its view that
man is a living being with a rational soul united to a body who finds
dignity in perfecting his reason—elevating man to the top of a natural
hierarchy but not quite equal to the highest substance in the
universe.
To understand this perspective, we might begin with the observation
that much of classical philosophy is a kind of “glorified” common
sense. Common sense tells us that human beings are neither
a single substance like matter, nor two separate substances, but a