Human Dignity and Bioethics

248 | Peter Augustine Lawler
modern understanding of the free beings with rights and the Christian
understanding of the dignity of the being made in the image and
likeness of the personal Creator.* In our eyes, the doctrine of rights
presupposes the real, infinite significance of every particular human
being. For us, our dignity is guaranteed not only by the individual’s
own assertiveness but with some natural or divine center of personal
meaning. Nature’s God, for us, is also a providential and judgmental
God, a personal God. That means our understanding of natural theology
is not the one criticized by St. Augustine or the one that was
quickly displaced by morally autonomous and “historical” claims for
freedom by the modern individual.
The American view on whether we’re more than natural beings,
or on whether there’s natural support for our personal existences, is
left somewhat undetermined. That means that we waffle on whether
or not we’re free individuals as Locke describes them, on whether
being human is all about the conquest of nature or rather about the
grateful acceptance of the goods nature and God have given us. That
waffling is judicious or even truthful. Even many Christians would
admit that there’s a lot to the Lockean criticism of Augustinian otherworldliness,
if not taken too extremely. And the Americans Tocqueville
describes and the American evangelicals we observe today
find their dignity in both their proud individual achievement and
their humble personal faith.
America is largely about the romance of the dignified citizen; all
human beings, in principle, can be equal citizens of our country. The
politically homeless from everywhere have found a political home
here. But that’s because we’ve regarded citizenship as more than just
a convenient construction to serve free individuals. We Americans
take citizenship seriously without succumbing to political theology
because we can see that we’re all equal citizens because we’re all more
than citizens. Being citizens reflects a real part, but not the deepest
* See the essays by Patrick Lee and Robert P. George and by Gilbert Meilaender
in this volume. It can be wondered whether Lee and George’s secular “natural law”
argument depends on the not self-evident proposition of our creation by a personal
God. And surely a shortcoming of Meilaender’s argument—at least in terms of formulating
American public policy—is his inability or unwillingness to connect his
Christian and egalitarian view of dignity to our secular understanding of rights.