Human Dignity and Bioethics

Commentary on Meilaender and Dennett | 281
nonetheless real personal responsibility was given to us by a personal,
loving God Who eludes our comprehension and control.
For Dennett, nothing human or natural or material is mysterious.
Everything can or will be comprehended by science and scientists.
That’s good because it means we can understand scientifically
why we have attributed dignity to ourselves. Insofar as we believe our
dignity is mysterious, we can’t consciously and rationally employ it
for the purpose of our social flourishing. So modern science, properly
understood, can make our dignity more effective. Dennett, of course,
has the merit of joining Meilaender in criticism of those who connect
our dignity with our autonomy, with our freedom from natural limitations
for laws or choices we impose on ourselves. For him, dignity
also, in a way, has its roots in our truthfully confronting our natural
limitations. Our fictional dignity properly understood depends on
our awareness of our real material situation. We are tempted to tell
Dennett that what he really means is that we have dignity as the beings
who can consciously shape our lives around a fictional concept
of dignity. He would respond: That’s not really dignity, because, in
truth, we’re not really choosing freely but just facing up to necessity.
These two extremists also share an egalitarian view of dignity, and
that separates them from members of the President’s Council—such
as Leon Kass and Diana Schaub—who tend to think that dignity is
fundamentally aristocratic, a display of one’s distinctive personal excellence.
Meilaender and Dennett deny that my dignity is dependent
on the excellence or virtue that I display in a particular social context.
That’s easy for Dennett to do: his view is that there’s nothing I can do
that would really make me dignified. Meilaender’s view is that nothing
that I can do can really make me undignified.
We can wonder, as Kass and Schaub do, how successful the two
extremists are in disconnecting dignity from real human achievement
in thought and action. Meilaender criticizes Kass for saying that because
patients lack agency they lack the capacity to be dignified. To
support his case, he gives the example of the dignified patient who
acts with patience in light of the truth about his dependent human
condition. He explains how patients can even be more truthful or
more dignified than manly or magnanimous men who take pleasure
in forgetting about the truth about their embodied, social, and
natural dependence and limitations. The patient he describes doesn’t