Human Dignity and Bioethics

Commentary on Meilaender and Lawler| 291
in the Beyond Therapy report, the Council rightly (and profoundly)
spoke about human flourishing—in other words, not just about the
right to the pursuit of happiness, but about the nature of happiness
itself. It investigated the character of mature and meaningful
human action and how certain biotech developments might impair,
cheapen, or debase such activities. The report was a defense of human
dignity and, as such, a demonstration or enactment of dignity. But,
even here, the language of dignity is inseparable from the language of
rights. We ask the question “what is happiness?” so that the answer
might guide our pursuit of it and so that we might better understand
how to secure the right to the pursuit of it.
Peter Lawler argues, both in his essay in this volume and, more
extensively, in the Council session devoted to this volume, 8 that the
language of rights was insufficient to either describe or confront the
horrors of fascism and communism (and that it may be similarly inadequate
today to the extent that biotechnology could be perverted
so as to “be at war with the very aspects of our nature that allow us
to be dignified beings”). Lawler remarks that dissidents like Solzhenitsyn,
Havel, and Pope John Paul II “were big on bringing back the
word ‘dignity’ because the word ‘rights’ just wasn’t enough.” I’m not
so sure. Perhaps they appealed to “dignity” because they didn’t come
from a rights-based tradition and weren’t aware of its range and rhetorical
power. Certainly, Churchill was eloquent in condemnation of
modern totalitarianism and adamant in resistance without recourse to
the word “dignity.” In his “War Speech” in the House of Commons,
Churchill explained the war against the “pestilence of Nazi tyranny”
as “a war, viewed in its inherent quality, to establish, on impregnable
rocks, the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive
the stature of man.” 9 For Churchill, that “stature” (which might
be construed as a synonym for dignity—of the “aristocratic” variety)
is inseparable from the assertion and protection of individual rights.
The human heights of a few are achieved on the firm ground of the
rights of all. Similarly, in response to the Soviet menace in his “Iron
Curtain” address, Churchill declared:
We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great
principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the
joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which