Human Dignity and Bioethics

Commentary on Meilaender and Dennett | 279
extreme defenses of dignity. Each man portrays himself, with good
reason, as a nice-guy extremist.
And their extreme positions are far from completely incompatible.
Meilaender and Dennett agree, for example, that dignity is not a
useless concept. They also agree that dignity has to be saved from the
inhuman reductionism of modern science, or at least from pervasive
misunderstandings of what modern science actually teaches. They
even seem to agree that our understanding of dignity—or at least
the inherited understanding of dignity that has distinguished and
ennobled our tradition—is Christian.
Meilaender claims that we are right to believe in the dignity of
each unique and irreplaceable human person and the only sensible
explanation for our faith in that observed phenomenon is the Christian
one; we were all given infinite significance by a personal Creator.
Our belief in the equal dignity of all human beings is an indispensable
part of our Christian inheritance. And our attempts to find a
foundation for that belief without Christianity become increasingly
shrill as they become more obviously futile.
Dennett agrees, with scientific condescension, that all our claims
for the reality of human dignity have been Christian. He adds that
all the Christian claims about the soul or some immaterial dimension
of personal existence have been refuted by modern science. For Dennett,
the belief in the soul or in dignity has the same status as belief in
mermaids. It’s no more silly to believe in some half-woman/half-fish
that nobody has ever really seen than it is to believe in a half-soul/
half-body that nobody has ever really seen. Everything that we do,
we now know, has a material explanation. In the spirit of Dennett’s
analysis, we might add two observations: Not so long ago, very smart
and astute people believed in souls, while mermaid-believers have
always been rather silly. And in the near future, biotechnology might
allow us to combine the materials of a woman and a fish to create
something like a mermaid. But we never will be able to create a soul,
to free ourselves from our essentially material being.
Dennett does claim to see with his own eyes—and this is very
important—that our need to believe in equal, personal dignity is
real. It is an observable characteristic of the type of being human beings
alone are. We are the social animals who conceive of projects to
live good, purposeful lives, although there is no scientific foundation