Human Dignity and Bioethics

356 | Martha Nussbaum
Suppose for a moment that we accept this move (though in fact
we should not accept it without some further distinctions, as I shall
later argue). So we grant that human dignity is inalienable, not damaged
in itself by bad fortune. Why, still, we might ask, could the
Stoics not have taken Aristotle’s line (and, later, Kant’s), drawing a
distinction between virtue and happiness? Why should we not say
that human dignity is necessary, but not sufficient, for the fullness
of human flourishing, or eudaimonia? Here again, it appears that the
Stoics are inspired by a kind of radical egalitarianism about human
worth. Think of the person who suffers poverty or hardship. Now
either this person has something that is beyond price, by comparison
to which all the money and health care and shelter in the world is as
nothing—or she does not have something that is beyond price, but
virtue is just one piece of her happiness, a piece that can be victimized
and held hostage to fortune, in such a way that she is needy and
miserable, even though she has human dignity. That would mean
that virtue is to be put in the balance with other things and is not the
thing of infinite worth that we took it to be.
Let’s put it this way. A virtuous person is hit by the blows of
fortune. Now either she is lofty and beautiful, and at no time more
beautiful than when she suffers the greatest loss 12 —or she is a pathetic
victim, moaning and groaning, asking fate and her fellow men
for help, childishly dependent. Plausibly, the Stoics don’t want to
depict virtue as flattering power. So they say: the virtuous person is
complete, even though she lacks the whole world.
Before we reject this move utterly, we should think about people
who are victims in our own society: let’s say, victims of inequality
based on race or sex or disability. There is a quite understandable
tendency for such people to demand things from the powerful, saying,
we need these things in order to live. But there is an equally understandable
tendency for some members of that group to say, “We
have our pride and strength. We are complete in ourselves. No whining
and complaining for us. We are more beautiful, ultimately, than
those who oppress us.” Think of recent attacks on “victim feminism”
in the name of “agency feminism.” Naomi Wolf, for example, decries
a “victim feminism” that “urges women to identify with powerlessness.”
13 Similarly, the disability-rights movement strongly resists the
notion that a disability is a deprivation. I think we see here the basic