Human Dignity and Bioethics

Human Dignity: the Council’s Vision | 261
basic and full humanity, with dignity accorded chiefly to the latter,
to a life in which the characteristic human excellences are developed
and displayed.
Such a view does, as I noted earlier, capture something almost all
of us believe to be true—as is seen in the way we give grades to students
or evaluate athletic and musical performances. In various areas
of life, some human beings seem to move beyond the basic humanity
shared with the rest of us and display excellence in ways that merit
our admiration. They flourish. That is, they develop characteristic
human capacities in ways that give all of us some inkling of what a
human being can actually become. If we like, there is nothing to prevent
us from saying that their lives display in a special way the dignity
of our human nature.
Yet, there is also, at least in certain contexts, something offensive
to our ears about this aristocratic way of depicting human dignity.
Thus, for example, in a speech of July 17, 1858, Abraham Lincoln,
while granting many human inequalities, also captured something of
the problem we have with an inegalitarian concept of dignity: “I have
said that I do not understand the Declaration [of Independence] to
mean that all men were created equal in all respects…. [B]ut I suppose
that it does mean to declare that all men are equal in some respects;
they are equal in their right to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.’ Certainly the Negro is not our equal in color—perhaps
not in many other respects; still, in the right to put into his mouth
the bread that his own hands have earned, he is the equal of every
other man, white or black.” 10
A concept of dignity that emphasizes differences of worth falls
harshly on our ears because we have learned to move in the opposite
direction from that which Kass takes: we have learned to let the comparative
notion of dignity be transformed when brought into contact
with the non-comparative and egalitarian. And we have learned this
in some considerable measure because there has been a great rupture
in Western culture, a rupture that gradually reshaped the classical notion
of dignity (with which Kass works) by bringing it within a system
of thought and practice that worshiped as God a crucified man
who suffered a criminal’s death on a cross. It would not be wrong to
say that, though he is depicted as going to that cross willingly, he was
“buffeted about by forces beyond [his] control,” and he died what