Human Dignity and Bioethics

Modern and American Dignity | 251
fear that we have the power or freedom to create some posthuman or
transhuman future. We’re stuck with ourselves, with our souls, with
being good in order to feel good.
Notes
1
See Chantal Delsol, The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century, trans. Robin
Dick (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2006), especially chapter 12.
2
The discussion of St. Augustine here is based on his City of God, especially books
5-8.
3
The account of the classical philosophic view offered here is defended by Thomas
Pangle, Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2006).
4
See John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1690). Support for my view of
Locke here can be found in the work of Michael P. Zuckert: The Natural Rights
Republic: Studies in the Foundation of the American Political Tradition (Notre Dame,
Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996) and Launching Liberalism (Lawrence,
Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2002).
5
Tom Wolfe, “The Human Beast,” the 2006 Jefferson lecture, available online at
www.neh.gov/whoweare/wolfe/lecture.html.
6
See Leon R. Kass, “The Right to Life and Human Dignity,” in Enlightening Revolutions:
Essays in Honor of Ralph Lerner, ed. Svetozar Minkov (Lanham, Maryland:
Lexington Books, 2006).
7
Ibid., p. 130.
8
See Pierre Manent, A World Beyond Politics, trans. Marc A. LePain (Princeton,
New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006).
9
Ibid., chapters 5-7, 11.
10
See Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (New York: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1983), p. 13.
11
See the Tocquevillian/Pascalian reflections on compassionate conservatism and
biology in chapter 5 of my Stuck with Virtue: The American Individual and Our
Biotechnological Future (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2005).
12
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Solzhenitsyn Reader, ed. Edward E. Ericson, Jr. and
Daniel J. Mahoney (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2006), p. 596.
13
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, especially chapters 11 and 18.
14
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, volume 2, part 1, chapter 5.
15
Ibid., volume 2, part 4, chapter 6.
16
Ibid., volume 2, part 1, chapter 7.
17
Delsol, op. cit., p. 194.
18
Hobbes, Leviathan, especially chapters 13 and 17.
19
See Walker Percy, op. cit., pp. 73-79.
20
Cf. my Stuck with Virtue, chapter 5, with the fate of Charlotte in the last chapter