Human Dignity and Bioethics

Human Dignity: the Council’s Vision | 255
to human dignity to view dead bodies as property that can be bought
and sold…. [B]odies are supposed to be treated with respect—with
funeral rites and burial or cremation—and not simply discarded like
worn out household furniture and certainly not sold by relatives (or
anyone else) to the highest bidder.” 5 And although an earlier chapter
had interpreted the language of respect for human dignity primarily
in terms of respect for autonomy, it is hard to believe that this alone
could account for the sense of “degradation” which, it is said, the
buying and selling of corpses would elicit in most societies.
In any case, in order to explicate and explore the idea of human
dignity, I turn first to the Council’s most recent report, Taking Care:
Ethical Caregiving in Our Aging Society (September 2005). 6 Having
begun with an exploration of tensions deeply buried within that report,
I will then be in a position to think more generally about those
tensions, well beyond the boundaries of the Council’s work itself.
Equal Dignity and Distinctions in Excellence
A distinction between two different senses in which one might speak
of human dignity is emphasized in Taking Care. The Council speaks
of this distinction in different ways. It notes, for instance, that the
language of dignity might be used to mark either a “floor,” a kind
of respect and care beneath which our treatment of any human being
should never fall—or it might be used to mark a “height” of
human excellence, those qualities that distinguish some of us from
others (106f.). Similarly, it contrasts a non-comparative manner of
speaking about the worthiness of human lives with various kinds of
comparative assessments (whether in economic terms or in terms of
nobility) of human worth (103f.). Or yet again, it notes a difference
between an “‘ethic of equality’ (valuing all human beings in light
of their common humanity)” and an “‘ethic of quality’ (valuing life
when it embodies certain humanly fitting characteristics or enables
certain humanly satisfying experiences)” (106).
The general point is, I think, clear, and it seems right to say that,
at different times and for different purposes, we are likely to speak in
either of these ways. Nonetheless, trying to find a way to do justice
to each of them simultaneously is no easy task. How to work out