Human Dignity and Bioethics

Modern and American Dignity | 245
Kantian person all experience themselves as unique and irreplaceable.
The self-defined self must make himself that way. Because I have to
make myself out of nothing without any guidance, I can be unique
without being utterly contingent only if you accord me the respect I
say I deserve. I can’t really be so unique that I’m not recognizable by
others in my infinite dignity. So I need you to recognize my dignified
uniqueness. Self-definition requires a social dimension.
This view of dignity puts a greater burden on those who must acknowledge
it than the Kantian one does. According to Kant, I must
respect you or treat you as an end only as a person capable of obeying
the autonomous moral law. But I don’t have to and even can’t
respect anything you do that falls short of full obedience to that law.
The Kantian must distinguish between moral and immoral intentions,
and Kant himself was sometimes quite judgmental or morally
severe. But now we believe we must respect the intention of whatever
the self-defining person chooses, even if it’s affirming as one’s whole
identity a natural inclination, such as being gay or straight.
That means we have the duty to go further than mere indifference
or non-judgmentalism. You don’t accord me dignity by saying,
“not that there’s anything wrong with it,” where “it” is whatever it is
I’m doing. Your yawning, in fact, is undignified. You must respect
what I do because I do it, even or especially because you wouldn’t
do it yourself. My dignity requires that you suspend your rational
faculties and moral judgment. Otherwise, your intention might intrude
upon my self-definition: I’m indignant when you employ your
self-definition or life plan not to have a respectful view of mine. That
indignation, of course, is merely an intensification of that felt by the
individual Hobbes describes. You have to do more than merely allow
me to exercise my rights for my autonomy to have its inescapably
moral dimension. 26
But the burden of autonomy defined as moral self-definition is
even greater on the person who claims it. Tocqueville tells us that the
characteristically modern and democratic view is that our dignity
rests in our intellectual freedom. We must free our minds from the
authority of parents, country, tradition, nature, God, and so forth.
But that means that it’s much more clear what a radically free or
genuinely autonomous judgment is not than what one is. Be yourself
and be unique, we’re told. But the individual human mind is anxious,