Human Dignity and Bioethics

Dignity and Bioethics | 477
values in the world, the recognition of the intrinsic value of something
depends upon one’s ability to discern what kind of thing it is. This
brings me to the notion of natural kinds, a relatively new concept in
analytic philosophy. 19 The fundamental idea behind natural kinds is
that to pick something out from the rest of the universe, one must
pick it out as a something. This, in turn, leads to what its proponents
call a “modest essentialism”—that the essence of something is that by
which one picks it out from the rest of reality as anything at all—its
being a member of a kind. The alternative seems inconceivable—that
reality is actually completely undifferentiated and that human beings
merely carve up an amorphous, homogeneous universe for their own
purposes. Reality is not homogenous but “lumpy.” It comes differentiated
into kinds of things. It seems bizarre to suggest that there
really are no actual kinds of things in the world independent of human
classification—no such things, de re, as stars, slugs, or human
beings.
Intrinsic value, to repeat, is the value something has by virtue of
its being the kind of thing that it is. Thus, the intrinsic value of a natural
entity—the value it has by virtue of being the kind of thing that
it is—depends upon one’s ability to pick that entity out as a member
of a natural kind. Intrinsic dignity, then, is the intrinsic value of entities
that are members of a natural kind that is, as a kind, capable of
language, rationality, love, free will, moral agency, creativity, aesthetic
sensibility, and an ability to grasp the finite and the infinite.
One should note that this definition is decidedly anti-speciesist.
If there are other kinds of entities in the universe besides human
beings that have, as a kind, these capacities, they would also have intrinsic
dignity—whether angels, extra-terrestrials, or (arguably) other
known animal kinds.
Importantly, the logic of natural kinds suggests that one picks
individuals out as members of the kind not because they express all
the necessary and sufficient predicates to be classified as a member of
a species, but, rather, by virtue of their inclusion under the extension
of a natural kind that, as a kind, has those capacities. The logic of
natural kinds is extensional, not intensional. As Wiggins puts it,
[The] determination of a natural kind stands or falls with the
existence of law-like principles that will collect together the