Human Dignity and Bioethics

312 | Leon R. Kass
Newtonian world view that captures even the human being, omitting
only the rational will. And there is something austerely dignified
in the Kantian refusal to confuse reason with rationalization, duty
with inclination, and the right and the good with happiness (pleasure).
Whatever persists of a non-utilitarian ethic in contemporary
academic bioethics descends largely from this principled moralistic
view.* Never mind that, for most people, human “autonomy” no
longer means living under the universalizable law that self-legislating
reason prescribes for itself, but has come to mean “choosing for yourself,
whatever you choose,” or even “asserting yourself authentically,
reason be damned.” Lurking even in this debased view of the “autonomous
person” is an idea of the human being as something more
than a bundle of impulses seeking release and a bag of itches seeking
scratching. “Personhood,” understood as genuine moral agency, may
indeed be threatened by powers to fiddle around with human appetites
through psychoactive drugs or computer chips implanted in
brains. We are not wrong to seek to protect it.
Yet Kant’s respect for persons is largely formal, abstracting from
how persons actually exercise their freedom of will. If, as he suggests,
universal human dignity is grounded in the moral life, in that everyone
faces and makes moral choices and is capable of living under
the moral law, greater dignity would seem to attach to having a good
moral life, that is, on choosing well and on choosing rightly. Is there
not more dignity in the courageous than in the cowardly, in the moderate
than in the self-indulgent, in the righteous than in the wicked,
in the honest man than in the liar? † Should we not distinguish between
the basic dignity of having freedom and the greater dignity of
using it well?
But there is a deeper difficulty with the Kantian dignity of “personhood.”
It is finally inadequate for our purposes, not because it is
* The respect for persons so widely celebrated in the canons of ethics governing
human experimentation is in fact a descendant of Kant’s principle of human autonomy
and the need to protect the weak against the powerful.
† This is not to say that one should treat other people, including those who live immorally
and eschew dignity, as if they lacked it. To the contrary, it may be salutary
to treat people on the basis of their capacities to live humanly and with dignity,
despite even great fallings short or even willful self-degradation. Yet this would
require that we expect and demand of people that they behave worthily and that
we hold them responsible for their own conduct.