What the Hell Is Human Dignity Anyway?
Nick Gillespie | May 12, 2008, 7:32am
Friend of reason Steven Pinker plows into the mushy category of "human dignity"—routinely invoked to argue against advances in science and medicine that will enliven and lengthen our lives—like nobody's business here:
Many people are vaguely disquieted by developments (real or imagined) that could alter minds and bodies in novel ways. Romantics and Greens tend to idealize the natural and demonize technology. Traditionalists and conservatives by temperament distrust radical change. Egalitarians worry about an arms race in enhancement techniques. And anyone is likely to have a "yuck" response when contemplating unprecedented manipulations of our biology. The President's Council has become a forum for the airing of this disquiet, and the concept of "dignity" a rubric for expounding on it. This collection of essays is the culmination of a long effort by the Council to place dignity at the center of bioethics. The general feeling is that, even if a new technology would improve life and health and decrease suffering and waste, it might have to be rejected, or even outlawed, if it affronted human dignity.
Whatever that is. The problem is that "dignity" is a squishy, subjective notion, hardly up to the heavyweight moral demands assigned to it.
Whole thing in The New Republic, via Arts & Letters Daily, here.
Read Pinker's reason interview here.
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ck | May 12, 2008, 8:18am | #
When it comes to rhetorical tactics, Pinker is making a huge mistake. There's nothing inherently inane about "dignity," and being anti-dignity is not a winning position. Unless you simply want to be a darling of contrarians and other educated people, Pinker has foolishly chosen a much harder row to hoe.
Dignity is what every human being is entitled to simply by virtue of being human. A very basic core of human rights is easy to define. Persons may not be murdered, tortured, or enslaved. Persons have the right, upon reaching adulthood, to broadly control their own lives. Persons are
ends in themselves—not merely
means created for the accomplishment of other peoples' goals.
Dignity, in short, is both
why people get a certain respect simply for being human, and it is
what they get by virtue of being persons. One of the most important thing about dignity is that it's a comprehensible, useful, and easily defensible concept with regards to adults but it's a bit of a mash when it comes to children, let alone fetuses. (E.g., you can't force adults to sit silently in a row of desks for 8 hours a day, listening to some old spinster. With children, we think it's neglect if you
don't do that! Likewise children can be yelled at, punished, grounded, put to bed, etc. etc. We understand why, if not how, children are a special case.
A fortiori. the "fetus dignity" of bioconservatives is plainly indefensible and usually downright moronic.)
Is the concept broad and a bit nebulous, fuzzy at the edges? Sure. But that's because its core is so solid that many charlatans and morons have tried to usurp it. Surrendering the concept to its worst abusers, as Pinker does, is worse than a crime—it's a mistake.
If you cede dignity, you give up the game. But this game—the progress of biotechnology, including regenerative medicine, gene therapy, treatments and cures for chronic disease and debilitating injury—is too damn important to give up.
Advocates of scientific progress should not disdain arguments for morality, we should seize them. In the coming decades, science will save many lives and alleviate much suffering—unless we actively sabotage the project.
Fluffy | May 12, 2008, 9:04am | #
CK,
If you read the article, you would see that what you are describing - "Persons may not be murdered, tortured, or enslaved. Persons have the right, upon reaching adulthood, to broadly control their own lives. Persons are ends in themselves—not merely means created for the accomplishment of other peoples' goals," - is actually
autonomy, and what the advocates of "dignity" are describing is something quite different, and something that stands in opposition to autonomy, as a limit to it.
Although Pinker seems to disdain Huxley, I think he did a great service by giving us a very accessible book that illuminates this issue nicely.
The conflict between autonomy and dignity comes down to a question of
happiness. We can imagine things one might do to manipulate human biology and psychology that would increase happiness, and therefore might be freely chosen by people who are completely autonomous, but which seem to go against basic concepts of human dignity. And Huxley provides examples of this quite well: he imagines a society where human happiness has been increased by fundamentally diminishing man biologically and psychologically to make him "fit" better into a modern technological society. I think Huxley's novel cuts right to the heart of the issue here and Pinker is wrong to dismiss it.
If there are going to be any occasions where dignity trumps autonomy, I think they will be instances where new technologies are used to
reduce human capacities instead of enhance them. If scientists want to develop technologies to make people more intelligent, that is not an offense against dignity; if they want to develop technologies to make people more stupid, it is. Even if that technology might make the recipient "happier", and would therefore possibly be freely chosen in some instances.
This fairly basic and common-sense rule of thumb would help clarify the issues around dignity quite a bit.
Even after adopting such a basic rule, there are still many unanswered questions: it's hard to say, for example, whether a technological advance that allowed for discrete control of brain chemistry to eliminate "negative emotions" would violate the rule or not. In some ways, this advance can be depicted as an enhancement, because it would make many peoples' emotional lives more rewarding. OTOH, it can be seen as a reduction in capacity, since it is eliminating certain areas of those emotional lives.
But it's a start.
