Human Dignity and Bioethics

Human Dignity and Public Discourse | 221
One might make the case that it is the most fundamental of political
questions. If politics is deliberating how we ought to order our life
together, there can hardly be a more basic question than this: Who
belongs to the “we”? Although ostensibly removing it from politics,
the abortion decisions forced into the political arena an issue that was
thought to have been settled in the centuries of civilizational tradition
of which our polity is part. Namely, that it is morally wrong and
rightly made unlawful deliberately to kill unborn children.
If a principle is established by which some indisputably human
lives do not warrant the protections traditionally associated with the
dignity of the human person—because of their size, dependency, level
of development, or burdensomeness to others—it would seem that
there are numerous candidates for the application of the principle,
beginning with the radically handicapped, both physically and mentally,
not to mention millions of the aged and severely debilitated in
our nation’s nursing homes. It may be objected that of course we as a
people are not about to embark upon such a program of extermination.
To think we might do so is simply bizarre.
As a culturally and politically contingent fact, that is true. But
under the regime of Roe, a regime extended to embryonic stem cell
research and other bioethical controversies, we have no “clear and
unambiguous” agreed-upon rule precluding such horrors. We do
have in our constituting texts, notably in the Declaration of Independence,
a commitment to natural rights; and we do have deeply
entrenched in our culture and politics a concept of the dignity of the
human person.
The question is: Who belongs to the community for which we
as a community accept responsibility, including the responsibility to
protect, along with other natural rights, their right to life? This is a
preeminently political question. It is not a question to be decided
by bioethicists. Bioethicists, by virtue of their disciplined attention
to this and related questions, are in a position to help inform political
deliberations and decisions about these matters, but they are
rightly and of necessity to be decided politically. They are rightly so
decided because our constitutional order vests political sovereignty in
the people who exercise that sovereignty through prescribed means of
representation. They are of necessity so decided because in this society
the views of moral philosophers—whether trained as such in the