Human Dignity and Bioethics

Modern and American Dignity | 235
body—part of me—as merely part of my net worth of dollars. And
surely a man or woman with a strong sense of personal worth—and
so with a strong desire to display the nobler virtues of courage and
generosity—would always want to do more than merely secure his or
her biological existence. The individual responds that I’m going to be
courageous or generous on my own terms; such risky virtue is not to
be required of me. And an obsession with the needlessly risky virtues
is for losers who don’t understand themselves. Dead people have no
real dignity or significance at all.
The real evidence, the individual notices, is on the side of identifying
dignity with the protection of rights. Leon Kass reminds us that
“liberal polities, founded on this doctrine of equal natural rights, do
vastly less violence to human dignity than do their illiberal (and often
moralistic and perfection-seeking) antagonists.” 7 The 20th century’s
monstrous offenses against human dignity—so monstrous that they
can’t be described as mere violations of rights 8 —came from those
who denied the real existence of individuals and their rights. Particular
human beings were ideologically reduced to fodder for their
race, class, or nation, for murderous and insane visions of humanity’s
non-individualistic future. Every attempt to restore civil theology in
the modern world—from the Rousseau-inspired dimensions of the
French Revolution onward—morphed into insane frenzies of unprecedented
cruelty aiming to eradicate the alienation that inevitably
accompanies our freedom. In a post-Christian context, we can’t really
defend personal dignity by neglecting individual rights.
Dignity vs. Nature
A sensible understanding of “inalienable rights” might be the protections
given to or required by self-conscious mortals, to beings stuck
in between the other animals and God. But the modern individual
characteristically doesn’t rest content with locating his dignity in his
acceptance of the intractable limitations of his embodiment. The
modern individual—the modern self—aims to be autonomous, to
use the mind as an instrument of liberation from or transcendence of
dependence on material or natural necessity. From this view, modern
individualism is not that different from the 20th century’s historical