Human Dignity and Bioethics

280 | Peter Augustine Lawler
for human conceptions of either virtue or purpose. So we can’t get
by without believing in some useful illusions—such as free will, love,
and dignity. And we can’t help but adhere to those beliefs in the
face of what we really know about our accidental, evolutionary, and
wholly material existences.
Dennett’s ingenious solution to the problem of the incompatibility
between scientific truth and dignified belief is to say, quite
candidly, that we’re hardwired to believe. And our allegiance to our
belief in equal human dignity can be supported by the good life it
makes possible for us. That our belief makes possible our flourishing
can be enough to sustain it; we can stop obsessing about whether it’s
actually true by just accepting the fact that it’s not. All we need to
know is that when we do believe we’re better off as social animals.
So the big difference between Dennett and Meilaender is not
over utility, but truth. For Meilaender, each of us is a unique and
irreplaceable being, hence not merely species fodder. And he would
deny, of course, that it’s either possible or useful to stop caring about
whether our dignified beliefs are actually true. Our belief in our dignity
corresponds to the mystery we can actually observe about members
of our species—human persons—alone.
That mystery has nothing to do with the separate existence of the
soul from the body. For Meilaender, almost nothing is more deceptive
than thinking of ourselves as somehow detached from our bodies,
as “souls” or “spirits” or “autonomous agents” somehow looking
down on our bodies from some undisclosed location. He agrees with
Dennett that we can’t separate ourselves from our embodiment, and
so, from his view, Dennett presents at best a crude and fundamentally
misleading caricature of what Christians actually believe.
For Meilaender, the mystery of human life is that we are the only
beings, as far as we know, who are given the dignified responsibility of
living well or badly with what we really know and who we really love,
who are conscious of both our limitations and our purposes, of our
biological mortality and our transcendence. Our awareness of this
mystery in no way depends on knowledge of a separable soul, knowledge
we simply don’t have. But we also know, when we don’t divert
ourselves from ourselves, that we have no fully adequate scientific
explanation for the mystery of being and human being. And it makes
perfectly good sense that our dignified experience of a mysterious but