Human Dignity and Bioethics

394 | David Gelernter
Some bioethicists say, by all means. But others rely on “human
dignity” to fend off the engineers who want to reshape human nature
like children fooling with Play-Doh.
Not only might engineers be able to roll humans out of their labs
who are more humane than we; they might be able to produce qualities
that are more important—that trump our humane-ness. A geneticallyengineered
masterpiece with less humanity than I but twice the IQ
might solve problems that I can merely commiserate over. (On similar
lines, surgeons are renowned for their abrasiveness; but if you
need an operation, you’ll almost certainly choose a talented, obnoxious
surgeon over a sweeter but less-talented specimen.)
Defining human dignity as “our essential humanity” has other
problems too. Some bioethicists (perhaps most?) approve enthusiastically
of human cloning. But some attack the idea and call it offensive
to human dignity. Yet if human dignity means “our essential
humanity,” cloning a human being produces more of the stuff, more
“essential humanity.” At least so it would seem. No doubt a contrary
argument is possible, but it’s certainly not obvious why human cloning
should raise the issue of human dignity at all.
And surely human dignity defined this way is not “inalienable.”
People can and do lose their “essential humanity.” If Hitler had appeared
at the Nuremberg trials, surely he’d have had no human dignity
to stand on. He had ground out every trace of humanity he ever
possessed as you grind out a cigarette underfoot. The same questions
arose (on a vastly smaller scale) in the case of Saddam Hussein. Yet
bioethicists like to treat “human dignity” as an attribute that all humans
possess unless and until it’s taken away by force.
Dignity and Sanctity
Here is a different way to define human dignity. We begin by looking
up the word “sacred” in (for example) the Oxford English Dictionary.
The definitions rest on “set apart” in many forms—“set apart
for or dedicated to some religious purpose”; “regarded with or entitled
to respect or reverence”; “secured by religious sentiment, reverence,
sense of justice, or the like, against violation, infringement, or
encroachment.” 4