Human Dignity and Bioethics

32 | F. Daniel Davis
of that knowledge, can be perverted so as to inflict egregious harms
on our fellow human beings—harms that go far beyond the failure
to secure their voluntary informed consent.
In brief, in light of such deep-seated divisions in the American
public, the chance for consensus seems slim, and the goal of agreement
may even be ill-advised, at least at this time for a national forum
in public bioethics. An alternative goal, challenging but achievable,
is to bring broader and deeper insights to the public understanding
of the issues of bioethics. In the service of this goal, the President’s
Council is to undertake, in the words of its charter, “fundamental
inquiry into the human and moral significance of developments in
biomedical and behavioral science and technology”; it is “to strive to
develop a deep and comprehensive understanding of the issues that it
considers”; and, it is “to articulate fully the complex and often competing
moral positions on any given issue.”
These passages from the charter of the President’s Council implicitly
suggest a critical view of contemporary academic bioethics, and
of the way bioethical questions are debated in the public square. Today,
for the most part, two justifications are advanced when bioethics
seeks to shape policy: first, the utilitarian justification, that the good
to be achieved for the many by X, Y, or Z (for example, by embryonic
stem cell research or by the use of “net benefit” calculations in organ
allocation) far outweighs the harm to the few; and second, the principlist
argument that respect for autonomy—that tried-and-true American
value—legitimates such controversial practices as unconstrained
reproductive decision making, assisted suicide, and euthanasia. Now
this depiction of contemporary bioethics is admittedly rendered only
in broad strokes. In the decades since the National Commission,
discourse in academic bioethics has been diversified by theoretical
“voices” other than utilitarianism and principlism: by feminist bioethics,
the ethics of care, and communitarianism, as well as by the
resurgence of such traditions as virtue ethics and Kant-inspired theories
of duty. Nonetheless, the tendency to seek ethical justification
for our gathering powers over human nature either in the calculated
good of the many or in the primacy of individual autonomy is undeniably
prevalent and is mirrored, for example, in Macklin’s essay. For
some observers, including some members of the President’s Council,
this tendency is the mark of an impoverished bioethics—a bioethics