Human Dignity and Bioethics

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Human Dignity and Respect
for Persons: A Historical
Perspective on Public Bioethics
F. Daniel Davis
Several aims converge in this volume of essays on the significance
of human dignity for bioethics, commissioned and published by
the President’s Council on Bioethics.* One aim is to take up the challenge
implicitly issued by American medical ethicist Ruth Macklin,
who bluntly asserted four years ago that “dignity is a useless concept
in medical ethics and can be eliminated without any loss of
content.” 1 In her critique of human dignity as a bioethical concept,
Macklin singled out the work of the President’s Council on Bioethics,
claiming that the concept functions as “a mere slogan” in such
Council reports as Human Cloning and Human Dignity. 2
Macklin goes on to compare the Council’s allegedly indistinct
use of dignity with the more precise meaning that the concept is
given in Genetics and Human Behavior: the Ethical Context, a report
published in 2002 by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics in the United
Kingdom. 3 In that report, she notes, dignity refers to the idea that
“one is a person whose actions, thoughts and concerns are worthy
* Hereinafter, “the President’s Council.”
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