Human Dignity and Bioethics

Two Arguments from Human Dignity | 437
dignity to have a home in secular as well as in religious thinking.*
So the allegation that human dignity is a theological value cannot
sustain an objection to the Council’s use of it.
Ruth Macklin has famously criticized the Council’s appeal to
dignity by arguing that, while dignity is frequently appealed to in
human rights documents and in Catholic social teaching, it is a “useless”
and therefore dispensable concept. She concludes that it is a
dispensable concept because, she says, dignity “means no more than
respect for persons and their autonomy.” 5 I do not contend that the
concept of human dignity is dispensable. On the contrary, I believe
that the concept of dignity can very helpfully be used to call attention
to the fact that we human beings have features in virtue of which
we are worthy of great respect. Furthermore, the fact that the notion
of human dignity is at home in a number of moral traditions
makes it an especially useful “second-level concept”—a concept for
expressing moral agreement among those who may differ about what
first-order ethical vocabulary best explains why human beings merit
respect. It is therefore just the concept one would expect to find in
public documents (such as international charters and the reports of
Presidential commissions) in which signatories from diverse traditions
and schools of thought express such agreement.
But the conclusion advanced here about the dependence of dignity
arguments on other arguments raises what should be a troubling
question for those who rely on arguments from dignity: the question
of how much of the work thought to be done by arguments from
dignity is in fact done by the prior arguments on which dignity arguments
depend. If the conclusion advanced here is right, then the
Council needs either to take up this question or to distinguish its dignity
arguments from dignity arguments of the sort considered here.
Furthermore, as we shall see at the end of this paper, the argument I
offer for my conclusion suggests that the Council needs to give considerably
more attention to questions on which it has touched all too
briefly, questions about the bases and the equality of human dignity.
* For a splendid and concise discussion of the historical sources of the notion of
human dignity, see Adam Schulman’s introduction to this volume.