Human Dignity and Bioethics

404 | David Gelernter
Thanks to modern technology, my death won’t matter. And the
thought that your own beloved child could die and you are then
solaced by a genetic duplicate is deeply obscene. (Yet it’s possible that
some parents would buy it.)
These cases are (again) beyond the realm of rights. If we say “you
have a right to a death that matters,” doesn’t this right apply to unloved
children too?—maybe orphans, maybe children of parents who
don’t care? And what about unloved adults? Or the elderly who have
no children or living spouse or relatives? The right in itself is good;
who could disapprove? But it is also ridiculous, because even if we
grant it there is no conceivable way to enforce it, to deliver on this
promise.
Once again, duty-morality seems more appropriate than rightsmorality.
And even though we are attempting to prevent crimes
against human dignity, it’s more accurate to say that our goal is to
prevent crimes against human sanctity. We are dealing with the creation
of human life. We are ordering man not to take this business out
of God’s hands—or out of nature’s, if you prefer. (But why shouldn’t
he take it out of “nature’s” hands? The reason not to take it out of
God’s is that “human sanctity” means “created in God’s image”—not
in some image cooked up by human engineers.)
In short, secularized, sanitized ideas are too weak for the task at
hand. “Human sanctity” is a stronger idea than “human dignity.” An
ethics based on universal, permanent rights is weaker, more opaque,
and more passive than an ethics based on universal duties.
I myself believe that “dignity” in the end is a religious idea, and
that we can’t be rational and moral animals unless we acknowledge
the God of Israel. But the ethics of duty is another matter. Although it
barely exists on philosophy’s agenda, there are reasons to believe that
the ethics of duty is intrinsically superior to the ethics of rights—more
precise and more expressive—regardless of your views on religion. (In
fact, we might trace the actual decline of religion not to Darwin and
modern science but to the rise of rights-talk versus the old dutiestalk,
which preceded Darwin by more than a century. Most people
don’t want duties but welcome rights. If duties are imposed on them,
they demand to know—reasonably enough—on whose authority;
and the only plausible answer comes down to “on God’s authority.”
But if someone awards you a right, why ask questions?)