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  • Losing Dignity*
  • Daniel Brudney

In 2003, Ruth Macklin declared that the concept of human dignity has no useful role to play in bioethics. Bioethics can make do, she asserted, with the concepts of respect for persons and autonomy. George W. Bush’s President’s Council on Bioethics asked 23 writers to respond to Macklin’s challenge. The result is the collection under review.

The collection has generated controversy. Though there is some diversity of viewpoint, on the whole it is stacked in favor of conservative, and especially conservative religious, positions. Is it scandalous that an ostensibly neutral and government-funded forum has been used for highly partisan ends? Of course. Is it surprising? Hardly. Still, this issue has been amply aired elsewhere (Pinker 2008), so I won’t dwell on it.

Rather, I want to start by stressing that, pace Macklin, “human dignity” is a concept whose investigation can be philosophically rewarding. As Adam Schulman’s excellent introduction points out, the concept has roots in multiple religious and philosophical traditions, and while this heterogeneous lineage makes for complexity, it also makes for conceptual richness. To give a taste of that richness, let’s note just a few of the many distinctions one might make in thinking about human dignity.

First, something might have human dignity in virtue of possessing a certain property: rationality, being made in the image of God, merely being a human being (Diamond 1991). The idea is that this property confers a highly valuable [End Page 454] status on whatever entity has it. Here, human dignity is a status concept. The status could rest on mere potential, and it might be capable of instantiation in nonhumans (as with rationality). The point is that here dignity is tied to the kind of thing one is. There is room for dispute about which property bestows dignity, and about what makes that property valuable—after all, what is so great about being rational?—but this is one kind of dispute that human dignity could involve.

A second dispute would focus on determining which kinds of conduct, laws, and attitudes would violate human dignity, would be at odds with whatever property it is that gives us dignity (Hill 1973). What counts as a violation, however, will not be straightforward. For instance, suppose dignity derives from being made in God’s image. Which ways of treating me are at odds with that status?

Human dignity might also have implications for how something with the relevant status may permissibly come into being. Nothing about the concepts, say, of being rational or being made in God’s image directly implies that only some ways of coming to be a human being are permissible. To reject some ways of generating a human being requires additional claims (for example, that being made in God’s image cannot involve IVF or cloning), and any such claims will need justification.

These debates come from taking dignity as a status concept, but dignity can have a further dimension. We sometimes talk of the dignified way in which someone faces great pain or a final illness. Here, the praise is for what one does, not what one is: dignity is not a status but an achievement concept (Darwall 1977). Naturally, in this case, too, there could be debate. Is dignity truly revealed by the stiffest of stiff upper lips, or by a certain way of acknowledging pain, sadness, mortality?

Although these distinctions are hardly exhaustive, they point to two things. First, it is wrong to deny the potential philosophical fruitfulness of the concept of human dignity. Second, the debates adumbrated above ought to lead to lots of mixed positions on bioethical issues: the position one takes with regard to any of the four aspects of human dignity mentioned entails no particular position with regard to any of the others. As a conceptual matter, a view of which property gives us a status with dignity entails little about which forms of treatment would violate that status, which ways of coming into being accord with dignity, or which kinds of conduct manifest dignity. In each case, navigation among these areas requires additional and almost certainly disputable premises. Given this feature of the...

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