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Chapter Four Dignity and Enhancement in the Holy City karen฀lebacqz The enhancement debate appears as an “either/or”—either enhancement threatens something about our human dignity because it defies limits intrinsic to human beings and hence to human dignity, or enhancement may contribute to human dignity. The first is roughly the view of the President’s Council on Bioethics in Beyond Therapy; the second is a position expressed by Nick Bostrom in his critique of that volume.1 I propose that, from a Christian perspective, the impact of enhancement on human dignity need not be an “either/or.” Rather, there are reasons both to offer some cautions and also to affirm many if not most enhancements to human life. The more interesting question may be: What constitutes a genuine “enhancement,” and of what does “dignity” consist? For purposes of this chapter I accept Bostrom’s definition of an enhancement as an intervention that “improves the functioning of some subsystem of an organism beyond its reference state” or “creates an entirely new functioning or subsystem that the organism previously lacked.”2 By “reference state,” Bostrom intends the “normal, healthy” state of a subsystem. The meaning of dignity is itself a controversial topic, and some hints toward an understanding will emerge as we proceed. The Debate The President’s Council on Bioethics, in Beyond Therapy, offers the view that, as tempting as some “enhancements” may be, they are dangerous and should be avoided because they threaten something important about human dignity. For example, with regard to the question of using enhancements in sports, the council asserts that “understanding the true dignity of excellent human activity” will show us that “new ways of improving performance may distort or undermine it.”3 To support this position the council points out that the dignity of a sport is determined not by the result but by the way it is done and by the identity of the doer. A runner on steroids, they suggest, is less obviously “himself” and less obviously “human” than is his opponent 52฀ karen฀lebacqz who has not taken steroids. In short the act done must be a “human” act—it must be truly “one’s own.” Only then, the council implies, does it exhibit human dignity. But what about the fact that we are choosing animals? If choosing makes us distinctively human, then why is the choice of using steroids not precisely a manifestation of human dignity? The answer to this question given by the President’s Council on Bioethics is carefully nuanced: The problem lies not in the choosing per se, but in the fact that we have chosen to bypass our bodily integrity.4 In so doing, we have “divided” ourselves and have ceased to be an embodied unity. Hence, our dignity must reside to some degree in accepting our embodiment and honoring the limits that it places on us. Our excellence must be our own embodied excellence; only then can it be considered dignified. “What matters is that we produce the given result . . . in a human way as human beings, not simply as inputs who produce outputs .”5 In short the council asserts that there is a difference between “real” and “false” excellence. It is human agency that gives superior performance its dignity.6 These reflections on human agency and its role in human dignity are given an even stronger emphasis in the summary to Beyond Therapy. Here, the President’s Council on Bioethics asserts that the Promethean temptation to remake nature is to be faulted not simply because it may lead to bad consequences but also because it is a wrong attitude: It is a failure to appreciate and respect the “given-ness” or “giftedness” of the world.7 What is disquieting about the use of drugs to improve memory or alertness is not that such drugs are artificial; after all, medicine itself is artificial in that sense. The real issue is the problem of self-alienation.8 There may be human goods that are inseparable from our aging bodies, for example.9 Living with full awareness of our finitude may be the condition of the best things in human life—engagement, seriousness, a taste for beauty, the quest for meaning, and so on. The council asserts: “A flourishing human life is not a life lived with an ageless body or an untroubled soul, but rather a life lived in rhythmed time, mindful of time’s limits.”10 In our enhancement efforts, we risk making our...

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