Human Dignity and Bioethics

184 | Nick Bostrom
may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned
you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own
nature…. We have made you a creature neither of heaven
nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you
may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion
yourself in the form you may prefer. 13
While Mirandola does not distinguish between different forms of
dignity, it seems that he is suggesting both that our Human Dignity
consists in our capacity for self-shaping and also that we gain in Dignity
as a Quality through the exercise of this capacity.
It is thus possible to argue that the act of voluntary, deliberate
enhancement adds to the dignity of the resulting trait, compared to
possessing the same trait by mere default.
The Enhancer’s Attitude
At this point we must introduce a significant qualification. Other
things being equal, defiance seems more dignified than compliance
and adaptation. As Kolnai notes, “pliability, unresisting adaptability
and unreserved self-adjustment are prototypal opposites of Dignity.”
Elaborating, Kolnai writes:
It might be argued that the feature sometimes described as the
“meretricious” embodies the culmination of Un-Dignity….
What characterizes the meretricious attitude is the intimate
unity of abstract self-seeking and qualitative self-effacement.
The meretricious type of person is, ideally speaking, at once
boundlessly devoted to the thriving of his own life and indifferent
to its contents. He wallows in his dependence on his
environment—in sharp contrast to the dignity of a man’s setting
bounds to the impact of its forces and undergoing their
influence in a distant and filtered fashion—and places himself
at the disposal of alien wants and interests without organically
(which implies, selectively) espousing any of them….
[He] escapes the tensions of alienation by precipitate fusion
and headlong surrender, and evades self-transcendence by