Human Dignity and Bioethics

Defending Human Dignity | 299
of human activity and human excellence, threatened by reliance on
performance-enhancing or performance-transforming drugs; the dignity
of living deliberately and self-consciously, mindful of the human
life cycle and our finitude, threatened by efforts to deny or eliminate
aging and to conquer mortality; the dignity of dying well (or of living
well while dying), threatened by excessive medical intervention
at the end of life; and the dignity of human being as such, threatened
by the prospect of euthanasia and other “technical solutions” for the
miseries that often accompany the human condition. 2 Beyond these
practical issues, the Council has also tried to call attention to the
dignity of proper human self-understanding, threatened by shallow
“scientistic” thinking about human phenomena—for example, views
of human life that see organisms as mere means for the replication
of their genes, the human body as a lifeless machine, or human love
and moral choice as mere neurochemical events. 3 In my own personal
writings on biology and human affairs, spanning over thirty-five
years, I have dealt with many of the same aspects of human dignity
and the dangers they face from the new biology, both to our practice
and to our thought. 4
Yet neither the Council nor I have tried to articulate a full theoretical
account of human dignity; neither have we tried to reconcile
some of the competing views that are held by the various members,
all bidding fair to gain our assent. This essay is offered as a contribution
toward the development of such a conceptual account. Specifically,
it aims to do three things: to defend a robust role in bioethics
for the idea of human dignity; to make clearer what human dignity is
and what it rests on; and to try to show the relationship between two
equally important but sometimes competing ideas of human dignity:
the basic dignity of human being and the full dignity of being (actively)
human, of human flourishing.*
* Application to specific bioethical topics and debates of any conceptual clarifications
found in this essay must await subsequent exploration. The purpose of this
paper is entirely philosophical; and it intends no immediate or direct implications
for public policy in any substantive field of bioethics.