Human Dignity and Bioethics

Human Dignity and Public Discourse | 219
is frequently seen as an alien intrusion upon or a poor substitute for
the search for “clear and unambiguous guidance.” But the search for
guidance through the controversies besetting us is precisely a political
task.
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and his Politics are both discourses
on morality. From them we can derive this definition of politics:
Politics is free persons deliberating the question, How ought we to order
our life together? The “ought” in that suggested definition clearly indicates
that politics is—in its nature, if not always in its practice—a
moral enterprise. Our political vocabulary—what is fair or unfair,
what is just or unjust, what serves the common good—is inescapably
a moral vocabulary. Contra David Hume and many others, an ought
can be derived from an is, and typically is so derived in the ordinary
experience of individuals and communities. Neither agreement nor
consensus is required on all the details of “whatever it is about human
beings that entitles them to basic human rights and freedoms.”
The political consensus of the Universal Declaration, although
very important, undoubtedly rests upon a philosophically thin account
of the dignity of the human person. That is in large part because
the “international community” is not a community. It is not,
in Aristotle’s sense of the term, a polis in which free persons deliberate
the question, How ought we to order our life together? Of course,
there are many and interesting debates about whether the United
States or its several states qualify as a polis. Without going into the
details of those debates, it is beyond dispute that our constitutional
order presents itself as a political community deliberating its right
ordering on the basis of the political sovereignty of “the people” exercised
through the specified means of representative democracy. The
foundational principle here is the statement of the Declaration of
Independence that just government is derived from the consent of
the governed.
The question of the dignity of the human person is rightly understood
as a political question. It is inescapably a political question.
The resolution (always provisional and open to revision) of the great
majority of political disputes does not ordinarily require delving into
the foundational truths explored by philosophy, ethics, and theology.
Our political discourse is guided, and frequently misguided, by
custom, habits, and tacit understandings. Proponents of “natural law