Human Dignity and Bioethics

124 | Gilbert Meilaender
(though she puts forward this view only while donning the robes
of the prophet peering into a distant future) that bettering the human
condition—and, more particularly, our own condition or that
of others dear to us—is the only consideration that really matters in
moral evaluation. She seems to think the analogy of fertilized apple
seed to embryo as apple tree is to person an illuminating one, even
though her discussion does not tell us how or when one becomes a
person—without which information we could scarcely know what
even to think about the analogy.
But when these and other flaws are set to the side, we are still left
with the fact that this paper sheds no light on what we mean by human
dignity—and, hence, no light on how it might be endangered
or protected. Churchland speaks of “threats” to human dignity, but
she eschews the first task of an author: to help her readers understand
why people have cared about her subject.
They have cared in some considerable measure because they have
thought that there might be ways of failing to recognize or demeaning
the dignity of persons that did not necessarily involve harming
them and that might even, in certain respects, benefit them. Nothing
she says helps us think better about whether human dignity is in any
way undermined when (say) parents attempt to determine the sex
of their child, when those without diagnosed illness medicate themselves
in order to feel “better than well,” when we attempt to enhance
performance (of various sorts) by means of drugs, when someone is
tortured. These are all instances in which we may have recourse to the
language of dignity in order to express moral concern or condemnation;
yet, nothing Churchland says helps us in any way to understand
or evaluate such language.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that she is utterly tone deaf to
the sorts of reasons Roman Catholics might have for rejecting contraception,
or the reasons Catholics and others might have for thinking
in vitro fertilization a violation of human dignity, or for worrying
about cutting up dead bodies in order to seek knowledge or living
bodies in order to get organs for transplant. I see no evidence that she
could even begin to explain why, from their perspective, these people
view such practices as violations of human dignity. And unless and
until one is capable of that, the most dignified thing to do would be
to remain silent.