MAY 28, 2008
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This spring, the President's Council on Bioethics released a 555-page report, titled Human Dignity and Bioethics. The Council, created in 2001 by George W. Bush, is a panel of scholars charged with advising the president and exploring policy issues related to the ethics of biomedical innovation, including drugs that would enhance cognition, genetic manipulation of animals or humans, therapies that could extend the lifespan, and embryonic stem cells and so-called "therapeutic cloning" that could furnish replacements for diseased tissue and organs. Advances like these, if translated into freely undertaken treatments, could make millions of people better off and no one worse off. So what's not to like? The advances do not raise the traditional concerns of bioethics, which focuses on potential harm and coercion of patients or research subjects. What, then, are the ethical concerns that call for a presidential council?
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. The bioethicist Ruth Macklin, who had been fed up with loose talk about dignity intended to squelch research and therapy, threw down the gauntlet in a 2003 editorial, "Dignity Is a Useless Concept." Macklin argued that bioethics has done just fine with the principle of personal autonomy--the idea that, because all humans have the same minimum capacity to suffer, prosper, reason, and choose, no human has the right to impinge on the life, body, or freedom of another. This is why informed consent serves as the bedrock of ethical research and practice, and it clearly rules out the kinds of abuses that led to the birth of bioethics in the first place, such as Mengele's sadistic pseudoexperiments in Nazi Germany and the withholding of treatment to indigent black patients in the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study. Once you recognize the principle of autonomy, Macklin argued, "dignity" adds nothing.
Goaded by Macklin's essay, the Council acknowledged the need to put dignity on a firmer conceptual foundation. This volume of 28 essays and commentaries by Council members and invited contributors is their deliverable, addressed directly to President Bush. The report does not, the editors admit, settle the question of what dignity is or how it should guide our policies. It does, however, reveal a great deal about the approach to bioethics represented by the Council. And what it reveals should alarm anyone concerned with American biomedicine and its promise to improve human welfare. For this government-sponsored bioethics does not want medical practice to maximize health and flourishing; it considers that quest to be a bad thing, not a good thing.
To understand the source of this topsy-turvy value system, one has to look more deeply at the currents that underlie the Council. Although the Dignity report presents itself as a scholarly deliberation of universal moral concerns, it springs from a movement to impose a radical political agenda, fed by fervent religious impulses, onto American biomedicine.
The report's oddness begins with its list of contributors. Two (Adam Schulman and Daniel Davis) are Council staffers, and wrote superb introductory pieces. Of the remaining 21, four (Leon R. Kass, David Gelernter, Robert George, and Robert Kraynak) are vociferous advocates of a central role for religion in morality and public life, and another eleven work for Christian institutions (all but two of the institutions Catholic). Of course, institutional affiliation does not entail partiality, but, with three-quarters of the invited contributors having religious entanglements, one gets a sense that the fix is in. A deeper look confirms it.
Conspicuous by their absence are several fields of expertise that one might have thought would have something to offer any discussion of dignity and biomedicine. None of the contributors is a life scientist--or a psychologist, an anthropologist, a sociologist, or a historian. According to one of the introductory chapters, the Council takes a "critical view of contemporary academic bioethics and of the way bioethical questions are debated in the public square"--so critical, it seems, that Macklin (the villain of almost every piece) was not invited to expand on her argument, nor were mainstream bioethicists (who tend to be sympathetic to Macklin's viewpoint) given an opportunity to defend it.
Despite these exclusions, the volume finds room for seven essays that align their arguments with Judeo-Christian doctrine. We read passages that assume the divine authorship of the Bible, that accept the literal truth of the miracles narrated in Genesis (such as the notion that the biblical patriarchs lived up to 900 years), that claim that divine revelation is a source of truth, that argue for the existence of an immaterial soul separate from the physiology of the brain, and that assert that the Old Testament is the only grounds for morality (for example, the article by Kass claims that respect for human life is rooted in Genesis 9:6, in which God instructs the survivors of his Flood in the code of vendetta: "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God was man made").
The Judeo-Christian--in some cases, explicitly biblical--arguments found in essay after essay in this volume are quite extraordinary. Yet, aside from two paragraphs in a commentary by Daniel Dennett, the volume contains no critical examination of any of its religious claims.
How did the United States, the world's scientific powerhouse, reach a point at which it grapples with the ethical challenges of twenty-first-century biomedicine using Bible stories, Catholic doctrine, and woolly rabbinical allegory? Part of the answer lies with the outsize influence of Kass, the Council's founding director (and an occasional contributor to TNR), who came to prominence in the 1970s with his moralistic condemnation of in vitro fertilization, then popularly known as "test-tube babies." As soon as the procedure became feasible, the country swiftly left Kass behind, and, for most people today, it is an ethical no-brainer. That did not stop Kass from subsequently assailing a broad swath of other medical practices as ethically troubling, including organ transplants, autopsies, contraception, antidepressants, even the dissection of cadavers.
Kass frequently makes his case using appeals to "human dignity" (and related expressions like "fundamental aspects of human existence" and "the central core of our humanity"). In an essay with the revealing title "L'Chaim and Its Limits, " Kass voiced his frustration that the rabbis he spoke with just couldn't see what was so terrible about technologies that would extend life, health, and fertility. "The desire to prolong youthfulness," he wrote in reply, is "an expression of a childish and narcissistic wish incompatible with devotion to posterity." The years that would be added to other people's lives, he judged, were not worth living: "Would professional tennis players really enjoy playing 25 percent more games of tennis?" And, as empirical evidence that "mortality makes life matter," he notes that the Greek gods lived "shallow and frivolous lives"--an example of his disconcerting habit of treating fiction as fact. (Kass cites Brave New World five times in his Dignity essay.)
Kass has a problem not just with longevity and health but with the modern conception of freedom. There is a "mortal danger," he writes, in the notion "that a person has a right over his body, a right that allows him to do whatever he wants to do with it." He is troubled by cosmetic surgery, by gender reassignment, and by women who postpone motherhood or choose to remain single in their twenties. Sometimes his fixation on dignity takes him right off the deep end:
Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone--a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. ... Eating on the street--even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat--displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. ... Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. ... This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.
And, in 2001, this man, whose pro-death, anti-freedom views put him well outside the American mainstream, became the President's adviser on bioethics--a position from which he convinced the president to outlaw federally funded research that used new stem-cell lines. In his speech announcing the stem-cell policy, Bush invited Kass to form the Council. Kass packed it with conservative scholars and pundits, advocates of religious (particularly Catholic) principles in the public sphere, and writers with a paper trail of skittishness toward biomedical advances, together with a smattering of scientists (mostly with a reputation for being religious or politically conservative). After several members opposed Kass on embryonic stem-cell research, on therapeutic cloning (which Kass was in favor of criminalizing), and on the distortions of science that kept finding their way into Council reports, Kass fired two of them (biologist Elizabeth Blackburn and philosopher William May) and replaced them with Christian-affiliated scholars.
Though Kass has jawboned his version of bioethics into governmental deliberation and policy, it is not just a personal obsession of his but part of a larger movement, one that is increasingly associated with Catholic institutions. (In 2005, Kass relinquished the Council chairmanship to Edmund Pellegrino, an 85-year-old medical ethicist and former president of the Catholic University of America.) Everyone knows about the Bush administration's alliance with evangelical Protestantism. But the pervasive Catholic flavoring of the Council, particularly its Dignity report, is at first glance puzzling. In fact, it is part of a powerful but little-known development in American politics, recently documented by Damon Linker in his book The Theocons.
For two decades, a group of intellectual activists, many of whom had jumped from the radical left to the radical right, has urged that we rethink the Enlightenment roots of the American social order. The recognition of a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and the mandate of government to secure these rights are too tepid, they argue, for a morally worthy society. This impoverished vision has only led to anomie, hedonism, and rampant immoral behavior such as illegitimacy, pornography, and abortion. Society should aim higher than this bare-bones individualism and promote conformity to more rigorous moral standards, ones that could be applied to our behavior by an authority larger than ourselves.
Since episodes of divine revelation seem to have decreased in recent millennia, the problem becomes who will formulate and interpret these standards. Most of today's denominations are not up to the task: Evangelical Protestantism is too anti-intellectual, and mainstream Protestantism and Judaism too humanistic. The Catholic Church, with its long tradition of scholarship and its rock-solid moral precepts, became the natural home for this movement, and the journal First Things, under the leadership of Father Richard John Neuhaus, its mouthpiece. Catholicism now provides the intellectual muscle behind a movement that embraces socially conservative Jewish and Protestant intellectuals as well. When Neuhaus met with Bush in 1998 as he was planning his run for the presidency, they immediately hit it off.
Three of the original Council members (including Kass) are board members of First Things, and Neuhaus himself contributed an essay to the Dignity volume. In addition, five other members have contributed articles to First Things over the years. The concept of dignity is natural ground on which to build an obstructionist bioethics. An alleged breach of dignity provides a way for third parties to pass judgment on actions that are knowingly and willingly chosen by the affected individuals. It thus offers a moralistic justification for expanded government regulation of science, medicine, and private life. And the Church's franchise to guide people in the most profound events of their lives--birth, death, and reproduction--is in danger of being undermined when biomedicine scrambles the rules. It's not surprising, then, that "dignity" is a recurring theme in Catholic doctrine: The word appears more than 100 times in the 1997 edition of the Catechism and is a leitmotif in the Vatican's recent pronouncements on biomedicine.
To be fair, most of the chapters in the Dignity volume don't appeal directly to Catholic doctrine, and of course the validity of an argument cannot be judged from the motives or affiliations of its champions. Judged solely on the merits of their arguments, how well do the essayists clarify the concept of dignity?
By their own admission, not very well. Almost every essayist concedes that the concept remains slippery and ambiguous. In fact, it spawns outright contradictions at every turn. We read that slavery and degradation are morally wrong because they take someone's dignity away. But we also read that nothing you can do to a person, including enslaving or degrading him, can take his dignity away. We read that dignity reflects excellence, striving, and conscience, so that only some people achieve it by dint of effort and character. We also read that everyone, no matter how lazy, evil, or mentally impaired, has dignity in full measure. Several essayists play the genocide card and claim that the horrors of the twentieth century are what you get when you fail to hold dignity sacrosanct. But one hardly needs the notion of "dignity" to say why it's wrong to gas six million Jews or to send Russian dissidents to the gulag.
So, despite the best efforts of the contributors, the concept of dignity remains a mess. The reason, I think, is that dignity has three features that undermine any possibility of using it as a foundation for bioethics.
First, dignity is relative. One doesn't have to be a scientific or moral relativist to notice that ascriptions of dignity vary radically with the time, place, and beholder. In olden days, a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. We chuckle at the photographs of Victorians in starched collars and wool suits hiking in the woods on a sweltering day, or at the Brahmins and patriarchs of countless societies who consider it beneath their dignity to pick up a dish or play with a child. Thorstein Veblen wrote of a French king who considered it beneath his dignity to move his throne back from the fireplace, and one night roasted to death when his attendant failed to show up. Kass finds other people licking an ice-cream cone to be shamefully undignified; I have no problem with it.
Second, dignity is fungible. The Council and Vatican treat dignity as a sacred value, never to be compromised. In fact, every one of us voluntarily and repeatedly relinquishes dignity for other goods in life. Getting out of a small car is undignified. Having sex is undignified. Doffing your belt and spread- eagling to allow a security guard to slide a wand up your crotch is undignified. Most pointedly, modern medicine is a gantlet of indignities. Most readers of this article have undergone a pelvic or rectal examination, and many have had the pleasure of a colonoscopy as well. We repeatedly vote with our feet (and other body parts) that dignity is a trivial value, well worth trading off for life, health, and safety.
Third, dignity can be harmful. In her comments on the Dignity volume, Jean Bethke Elshtain rhetorically asked, "Has anything good ever come from denying or constricting human dignity?" The answer is an emphatic "yes." Every sashed and be-medaled despot reviewing his troops from a lofty platform seeks to command respect through ostentatious displays of dignity. Political and religious repressions are often rationalized as a defense of the dignity of a state, leader, or creed: Just think of the Salman Rushdie fatwa, the Danish cartoon riots, or the British schoolteacher in Sudan who faced flogging and a lynch mob because her class named a teddy bear Mohammed. Indeed, totalitarianism is often the imposition of a leader's conception of dignity on a population, such as the identical uniforms in Maoist China or the burqas of the Taliban.
A free society disempowers the state from enforcing a conception of dignity on its citizens. Democratic governments allow satirists to poke fun at their leaders, institutions, and social mores. And they abjure any mandate to define "some vision of 'the good life'" or the "dignity of using [freedom] well" (two quotes from the Council's volume). The price of freedom is tolerating behavior by others that may be undignified by our own lights. I would be happy if Britney Spears and "American Idol" would go away, but I put up with them in return for not having to worry about being arrested by the ice-cream police. This trade-off is very much in America's DNA and is one of its great contributions to civilization: my country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty.
So is dignity a useless concept? Almost. The word does have an identifiable sense, which gives it a claim, though a limited one, on our moral consideration.
Dignity is a phenomenon of human perception. Certain signals from the world trigger an attribution in the mind of a perceiver. Just as converging lines in a drawing are a cue for the perception of depth, and differences in loudness between the two ears cue us to the position of a sound, certain features in another human being trigger ascriptions of worth. These features include signs of composure, cleanliness, maturity, attractiveness, and control of the body. The perception of dignity in turn elicits a response in the perceiver. Just as the smell of baking bread triggers a desire to eat it, and the sight of a baby's face triggers a desire to protect it, the appearance of dignity triggers a desire to esteem and respect the dignified person.
This explains why dignity is morally significant: We should not ignore a phenomenon that causes one person to respect the rights and interests of another. But it also explains why dignity is relative, fungible, and often harmful. Dignity is skin-deep: it's the sizzle, not the steak; the cover, not the book. What ultimately matters is respect for the person, not the perceptual signals that typically trigger it. Indeed, the gap between perception and reality makes us vulnerable to dignity illusions. We may be impressed by signs of dignity without underlying merit, as in the tin-pot dictator, and fail to recognize merit in a person who has been stripped of the signs of dignity, such as a pauper or refugee.
Exactly what aspects of dignity should we respect? For one thing, people generally want to be seen as dignified. Dignity is thus one of the interests of a person, alongside bodily integrity and personal property, that other people are obligated to respect. We don't want anyone to stomp on our toes; we don't want anyone to steal our hubcaps; and we don't want anyone to open the bathroom door when we're sitting on the john. A value on dignity in this precise sense does have an application to biomedicine, namely greater attention to the dignity of patients when it does not compromise their medical treatment. The volume contains fine discussions by Pellegrino and by Rebecca Dresser on the avoidable humiliations that today's patients are often forced to endure (like those hideous hospital smocks that are open at the back). No one could object to valuing dignity in this sense, and that's the point. When the concept of dignity is precisely specified, it becomes a mundane matter of thoughtfulness pushing against callousness and bureaucratic inertia, not a contentious moral conundrum. And, because it amounts to treating people in the way that they wish to be treated, ultimately it's just another application of the principle of autonomy.
There is a second reason to give dignity a measure of cautious respect. Reductions in dignity may harden the perceiver's heart and loosen his inhibitions against mistreating the person. When people are degraded and humiliated, such as Jews in Nazi Germany being forced to wear yellow armbands or dissidents in the Cultural Revolution being forced to wear grotesque haircuts and costumes, onlookers find it easier to despise them. Similarly, when refugees, prisoners, and other pariahs are forced to live in squalor, it can set off a spiral of dehumanization and mistreatment. This was demonstrated in the famous Stanford prison experiment, in which volunteers assigned to be "prisoners" had to wear smocks and leg irons and were referred to by serial numbers instead of names. The volunteers assigned to be "guards" spontaneously began to brutalize them. Note, though, that all these cases involve coercion, so once again they are ruled out by autonomy and respect for persons. So, even when breaches of dignity lead to an identifiable harm, it's ultimately autonomy and respect for persons that gives us the grounds for condemning it.
Could there be cases in which a voluntary relinquishing of dignity leads to callousness in onlookers and harm to third parties--what economists call negative externalities? In theory, yes. Perhaps if people allowed their corpses to be publicly desecrated, it would encourage violence against the bodies of the living. Perhaps the sport of dwarf-tossing encourages people to mistreat all dwarves. Perhaps violent pornography encourages violence against women. But, for such hypotheses to justify restrictive laws, they need empirical support. In one's imagination, anything can lead to anything else: Allowing people to skip church can lead to indolence; letting women drive can lead to sexual licentiousness. In a free society, one cannot empower the government to outlaw any behavior that offends someone just because the offendee can pull a hypothetical future injury out of the air. No doubt Mao, Savonarola, and Cotton Mather could provide plenty of reasons why letting people do what they wanted would lead to the breakdown of society.
The sickness in theocon bioethics goes beyond imposing a Catholic agenda on a secular democracy and using "dignity" to condemn anything that gives someone the creeps. Ever since the cloning of Dolly the sheep a decade ago, the panic sown by conservative bioethicists, amplified by a sensationalist press, has turned the public discussion of bioethics into a miasma of scientific illiteracy. Brave New World, a work of fiction, is treated as inerrant prophesy. Cloning is confused with resurrecting the dead or mass-producing babies. Longevity becomes "immortality," improvement becomes "perfection," the screening for disease genes becomes "designer babies" or even "reshaping the species." The reality is that biomedical research is a Sisyphean struggle to eke small increments in health from a staggeringly complex, entropy-beset human body. It is not, and probably never will be, a runaway train.
A major sin of theocon bioethics is exactly the one that it sees in biomedical research: overweening hubris. In every age, prophets foresee dystopias that never materialize, while failing to anticipate the real revolutions. Had there been a President's Council on Cyberethics in the 1960s, no doubt it would have decried the threat of the Internet, since it would inexorably lead to 1984, or to computers "taking over" like HAL in 2001. Conservative bioethicists presume to soothsay the outcome of the quintessentially unpredictable endeavor called scientific research. And they would stage-manage the kinds of social change that, in a free society, only emerge as hundreds of millions of people weigh the costs and benefits of new developments for themselves, adjusting their mores and dealing with specific harms as they arise, as they did with in vitro fertilization and the Internet.
Worst of all, theocon bioethics flaunts a callousness toward the billions of non-geriatric people, born and unborn, whose lives or health could be saved by biomedical advances. Even if progress were delayed a mere decade by moratoria, red tape, and funding taboos (to say nothing of the threat of criminal prosecution), millions of people with degenerative diseases and failing organs would needlessly suffer and die. And that would be the biggest affront to human dignity of all.
Steven Pinker is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard and the author of The Stuff of Thought.
By Steven Pinker
94 comments
On behalf of all the country's Degenerate Ice Cream Lickers, Well Said Mr. Pinker!! I was extraordinarily impressed with the depth of insight and rationality you displayed in this essay. Though I was aware of the conservative bias within the President's Council on Bioethics, I was appalled to learn just how extreme and borderline deranged the Council's positions had become. Thank you for preserving the true merits of human dignity and not allowing the idea to be corrupted to further the socio-political agenda that threatens to stifle many of the hard won gains of modern science.
- Christopher Moody
May 10, 2008 at 12:07am
On behalf of all the country's Degenerate Ice Cream Lickers, Well Said Mr. Pinker!! I was extraordinarily impressed with the depth of insight and rationality you displayed in this essay. Though I was aware of the conservative bias within the President's Council on Bioethics, I was appalled to learn just how extreme and borderline deranged the Council's positions had become. Thank you for preserving the true merits of human dignity and not allowing the idea to be corrupted to further the socio-political agenda that threatens to stifle many of the hard won gains of modern science.
- Christopher Moody
May 10, 2008 at 12:11am
If the steady enfeeblement and diminishing capacity of aging is their idea of 'dignity,' they can have it. Spending a little time in even the best nursing homes, should be enough to convince any humane person...
- Frank Glover
May 10, 2008 at 1:46pm
On behalf of all the country's Degenerate Ice Cream Lickers, Well Said Mr. Pinker!! I was extraordinarily impressed with the depth of insight and rationality you displayed in this essay. Though I was aware of the conservative bias within the President's Council on Bioethics, I was appalled to learn just how extreme and borderline deranged the Council's positions had become. Thank you for preserving the true merits of human dignity and not allowing the idea to be corrupted to further the socio-political agenda that threatens to stifle many of the hard won gains of modern science.
- Christopher Moody
May 10, 2008 at 2:56pm
On behalf of all the country's Degenerate Ice Cream Lickers, Well Said Mr. Pinker!! I was extraordinarily impressed with the depth of insight and rationality you displayed in this essay. Though I was aware of the conservative bias within the President's Council on Bioethics, I was appalled to learn just how extreme and borderline deranged the Council's positions had become. Thank you for preserving the true merits of human dignity and not allowing the idea to be corrupted to further the socio-political agenda that threatens to stifle many of the hard won gains of modern science.
- Christopher
May 10, 2008 at 2:57pm
Professor Pinker, very nice job in in clearing up some of the fog of "human dignity" (along with "human existence" and "core of our humanity"). I only wish you could find a more transparent term than "human nature" in your own work. A stimulating read as always.
- Herzog
May 10, 2008 at 3:54pm
Once you get past the anti-religious sneers and the ideological paranoia, Pinker’s complaint about the concept of “dignity” in bioethics (“The Stupidity of Dignity,” May 28) boils down to two points: (1) the concept of “dignity” can be abused by people who want to limit legitimate medical research (2) the concept is unimportant in bioethics, which can get by perfectly well with concepts of “autonomy” and “respect for the person”. This only reveals that Pinker is more at home in the language of J.S. Mill (Pinker is a classical liberal and a utilitarian, as it suits the context). He does not seem to recognize that someone more comfortable with the language of dignity would agree that we should respect persons and their autonomy, and would not want to limit legitimate medical research. (Has Pinker actually read the essays about dignity in report he is reviewing?) Why then is the language of “dignity” threatening to Pinker? Primarily because the concept of dignity has played a role in arguments against certain particular practices like cloning and embryonic stem-cell research. Pinker not only supports such practices but calls them “ethical no-brainers.” He doesn’t see any moral question here because he assumes that there isn’t any violation of autonomy or any lack of respect for persons involved. In his judgment, these practices are legitimate medical research. But many people are convinced – not because of religious belief or prudishness, but because they understand the science behind it – that cloning and embryonic stem-cell research may involve the manipulation or destruction of individual human lives. In his 4000-word essay, Pinker never once acknowledges that issue, not even as a live question expert bioethicists might disagree about. Is instrumentalizing a human embryo, even at its most immature stage, a legitimate medical procedure or a barbaric violation of the Hippocratic Oath? That is the question. It can be framed in terms of whether such procedures violate the intrinsic dignity of human beings; and yes, religious people may inherit a conceptual framework in which framing the issue this way makes sense. But the issue itself isn’t about religious zealotry, and it’s not even about the concept of “dignity”; it’s about acknowledging the question of whether certain activities exploit, or even snuff out, real live human beings.
- Diogenes
May 12, 2008 at 2:01pm
Those interested in reading “Human Dignity and Bioethics” and drawing their own conclusions on this work are urged to contact the President’s Council on Bioethics to request a free copy at info@bioethics.gov. The essays can also be read online or downloaded at http://bioethics.gov/reports/human_dignity/. Diane M. Gianelli Director of Communications The President's Council on Bioethics
- Diane M. Gianelli
May 12, 2008 at 3:31pm
Those interested in reading “Human Dignity and Bioethics” and drawing their own conclusions on this work are urged to contact the President’s Council on Bioethics at info@bioethics.gov to request a free copy. The essays can also be read online or downloaded at http://bioethics.gov/reports/human_dignity/. Diane M. Gianelli Director of Communications The President's Council on Bioethics
- Diane M. Gianelli
May 13, 2008 at 11:16am
Pinker’s rationale against “dignity” in favor of “personal autonomy” is naïve at best. He portrays the use of “informed consent” as the “bedrock of ethical research and practice”. Unfortunately, the types of informed consent that are currently employed in our medical clinical experimental practices are anything but ethical. Take the case regarding the death of Jolee Mohr, a healthy mother with only moderate arthritis who enrolled in an arthritis gene therapy trial in 2007. Her informed consent was riddled with contradictory language that provided her with no true understanding of what dangerous risk she was undertaking. The way the consent form was administered to her, as well as, the monetary incentives provided to her physician to enroll patients in these trials, only represent the “tip of the iceberg” concerning the unethical issues involved in this case. The “cover up” in this arthritis gene therapy case regarding the inappropriate consent, the unethical clinical design and the disturbing autopsy results that proved that the gene therapy virus had unfortunately migrated from the injection site into Jolee Mohr’s brain, blood, spleen, tonsils and liver prior to her death is unnerving. Informed consent is useless protection when the medical, scientific and governmental industries forsake the concept of human dignity to promote science. The principle of “personal autonomy” will serve the scientific community just fine, but unfortunately, not the public. Human dignity does a better job.
- wdos
May 13, 2008 at 12:45pm
Diane-- An embryo that's slated for destruction may count as a "human being" (for sufficiently broad definitions of "human" and "be"), but its right to respect and autonomy is an issue as pressing as its right to vote. The cause sounds so high-minded until you realize that the rights you're trying to create will go uncomprehended, unused and unmissed. Once that plain fact of biology is on the table, how does an ethicist get around it? I can think of only two ways: 1) Challenge the facts. Insist your embryo has a soul and a creator who don't need nervous systems to take offense. In other words, religious zealotry. 2) Declare that questions of right and wrong hinge on some fudge factor which is better than the facts because it can mean anything that wins you the argument. In other words, "dignity." If you know of a third possibility, please share it.
- sitidos
May 13, 2008 at 4:36pm
Pinker might try persuading the UN to revise its Universal Declaration of Human Rights so as to eliminate any redundant appeals to human dignity.
- Patrick Molloy
May 13, 2008 at 5:32pm
To Diogenes: 1) It would seem to be a bit arrogant to use the name of a Greek philosopher - delusions of grandeur perhaps… 2) Your premise is that “life” begins at conception - that’s your religious interpretation which is fine for you but you have no right to inflict it on others. 3) From my reading of history it would seem that the many religions, including the Roman Catholic religion, have had no problem destroying the dignity of others via burning at the stake, stoning and just straight outright slaughter in the name of their belief and therefore have no special moral high ground to lecture anybody else. 4) Pinker’s point is that this so called council on bioethics is just a scam that injects a particular religious perspective into the debate without have the moral honesty to say so because if it did it would be seen for what it actually is: a gross violation of the establishment clause in the constitution. Should we be surprised by this president trampling on the constitution ….. To: Diane M. Gianelli 1) As you suggested I download the paper and read some parts ( admittedly not all) and was appalled by what I read. For example the section by Robert P. Kraynak basically says the only basis of human dignity is the christian bible… Again the injection a particular religious dogma into a government document is just not legitimate. I am very unhappy that MY tax dollars are being used to push a religious dogma. 2) I think the evaluation of the report by Pinker is very valid and in many respects the criticisms could, and in my mind should be, much harsher. On the whole the report is an ethical travesty. To be frank I am embarrassed that such a document carries the seal of the country of which I am a citizen.
- Joe Normal
May 14, 2008 at 1:55am
Mr. Pinker -- Great article! wdos -- You yourself say the consent in your example was "inappropriate" (and, based on your description, I'd agree) -- but doesn't that just show how "personal autonomy" works fine in bioethics, since the doctor gave her "no true understanding of what dangerous risk she was undertaking"? A new question -- What do any of you think, regarding the role of "dignity" -- as a concept or a word -- in Obama's foreign policy circle? http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_obama_doctrine
- Brian Rose
May 14, 2008 at 12:49pm
Unless I am mistaken, "personal autonomy" requires us to treat each individual as an end, never as a means -- or is that "human dignity"?
- Question
May 14, 2008 at 12:58pm
To “Joe Normal” (with an aside to "sitidos"): (1) As Diogenes, I’m just a pagan looking for an honest man; at least I’m not claiming to represent “everyman.” (2) Biology tells us that upon conception the “fertilized egg” is not a kind of zygote, but a very immature member of the species. In that sense, being a human being is a biological status. Whether we accord the further *moral* status of human worth (some call it dignity, Pinker prefers to refer to it as being a “person” worthy of “respect”) is a question that anyone, religious or not, has to make a judgment about. (3) I wasn’t defending Roman Catholicism, I was only suggesting that the answer to this question (whether everything that is biologically a living human being has the moral status of a human person) may be “yes”, but at least can’t be dismissed as something that “only religious” people care about. (Commenter “sitidos” is ignoring the question too. The notion of intrinsic human dignity helps to capture the position that what might be valuable about something, what might make it a person, and so what might require the respect of other people, is not that the something in question is conscious or capable of feeling, but that the something in question is the kind of thing it is.) (4) I see very well that Pinker wants to politicize the Bioethics committee and marginalize its findings as “religiously motivated”, but in doing so he ignores the real ethical questions that the Bioethics committee is actually addressing. His attempt to be a good propagandist forces him to be a bad philosopher. If you read the report, you will notice that its authors are well aware that “dignity” is not “merely” a “religious” idea. Far from being an ethical travesty, the report is theoretically quite sophisticated and ethically quite responsible.
- Diogenes
May 14, 2008 at 2:44pm
Joe Normal, You will find that biology textbooks do not have to put life into quotation marks, and that embryos are indeed alive. You will further find that it takes no religious view (but merely an understanding of biology) to discover that the embryo is a human life--it has human parents and its own DNA (making it identical with neither its mother or father). As to the source of human dignity or autonomy, well I don't know of anyone who thinks it's "the Bible." Some think, not implausibly, that God is the source of human dignity and human rights. Philosophers have tried to come up with robust secular accounts of rights--I'd say they mostly fail, and that the best one can do is say that without religion they are a contractarian creation that we highly value. That's not a terrible thing, though it doesn't give you much of an argument against a person (or nation) that happens not to value them. This is perhaps why the UN has such a dismal record in upholding human dignity. Perhaps, Joe Normal, you can tell us what you think the philosophical foundations of your own views of human rights are. I don't say this because I think these answers are easy or obvious, but because it appears that you do, and I'd be genuinely interested in the source of your self-assuredness. In the meantime, as you formulate your account of the foundations of human rights (recall that the Declaration of Independence is out of bounds for you, theocratic document that it is, with its grounding of rights in a Creator and all), you might want to read the former exec director of the council's reply to Pinker, here: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NmNiY2UyYzUwNDE1ODIxNWQ0YzFhYWFiZmRmYjVhMmQ=
- William R.
May 14, 2008 at 5:40pm
Which position is more likely to be open to abuse, possibly resulting in arbitrary ideological manipulation and illiberal oppression: A. Respect is due to every human being on account of their intrinsic dignity. B. Respect is due only to those who have certain mental or physical capacities or fulfill some desirable function in society.
- Just Wondering
May 15, 2008 at 12:29am
To Joe Normal: you really need to look up what the Establishment clause is meant to do: I for one am unhappy that MY tax dollars are use to promote the religious dogma of atheistic scientism, but the Establishment clause has nothing to do with that. You also need to realize the "tu quoque" (non-point 3) is not an argument, it is a logical fallacy. To be frank, I am embarrassed that my right to vote as a citizen is shared by someone who can write in the same paragraph "I downloaded the paper and read some parts (admittedly not all)" and "On the whole the report is an ethical travesty." What confuses you about the distinction between "parts" and "whole"? Do you carry such muddled thinking to the voting machine?
- John K.
May 15, 2008 at 7:46am
Joe Normal, let's hope you're not, really. I for one agree with Diogenes' counterpoints and take issue with M. Pinker's 'Big Science: Don't stand in our way and ask silly questions and stifle our successes with silly ethics because we, modern Scientists, represent the ultimate in homo sapiens sapiens' achievements and we neither want nor need any outside perspectives or, God forbid, religious-based thinking anymore; we should be answerable to no one (except perhaps to our ghostly funding agencies); we must hurry our research without delay because we must keep spinning that great wheel of scientific fortune (the lucrative patents) to keep up with the overseas competition.' Let's have some thoughtful oversight, eh? After all, scientific advances will continue to increment long after any of our short lifespans. Unless of course we rush to develop these newest 'miracle' enhancements to allow people to live forever. Without the spiritual-string theory attachments, of course. Oh, and M. Pinker, be sure to trot out a new Christopher Reeve every chance you get, too. Those heart strings were soul-stirring, I'm telling you.
- serr8d
May 16, 2008 at 2:10am
Pinker is making two related points, one moral and one political. First, dignity is a useless concept. Second, a liberal society does not allow paternalism. His concern is that conservatives will legislate moral views based on their own necessarily idiosyncratic (because contradictory, confused, and subjective) views of dignity. These views will constitute binding constraints on all, but not all give consent to them. The “neutrality” of a liberal society deals with justification of public policies – they cannot be justified on the basis of appeals to the supposed superiority of any particular vision of the good. I think we can agree with him on both points. Pinker turns to autonomy as a preferable concept both morally and politically. First, it is straightforward and non-controversial. Second, it offers a procedural answer to the good life: respect people’s rights to make their own decisions. Respect for persons is clearly an important moral concept for bioethics stemming from the Nuremberg trials. It is such respect that we risk losing if we coerce someone to adopt a view they do not freely choose. Pinker thinks this is the end of the story, but I do not. First, autonomy is only a straightforward concept if we de-Kantify it. For Kant, we act heteronomously if we act on the basis of the desires that we happen to have rather than in accordance with our rational will. And this is where the squishiness begins, because now we would have to know something about the nature of a person and how to act in accordance with it. But Pinker—like mainstream bioethics since the Belmont report—takes Kant out of the equation. He argues that dignity ultimately boils down to autonomy, which “amounts to treating people in the way that they wish to be treated.” So, unlike Kantian autonomy, bioethical autonomy has largely come to mean respectfully allowing people to act freely on the basis of the preferences that they happen to have. So this catches us up to his opening statement that enhancements, stem cell research, cloning, and age retardation “if translated into freely undertaken treatments, could make millions of people better off and no one worse off.” By “better off” he means that we would safely and freely satisfy the preferences that we happen to have. So, underlying his argument is a notion of a good life as one in which we are free to satisfy our given desires. But he is begging the question, because the issue is precisely what it means to be “better off” and whether these technologies will make us better off. A theory of preference satisfaction has some problems. First, desires can be ill informed. For example, what if people wish to be cognitively or physically enhanced or live longer but find out, after the enhancement or age retardation, that their lives are not as great as they thought they would be? Second, it can be unclear what we desire. This is especially the case with emerging technologies that offer new possibilities—it can be unclear what those possibilities are and if they are desirable. Third, our desires often conflict and even fall into a rough hierarchy. As my first-order volition, for example, I desire to smoke, but I also have a second-order volition, which is my desire to not want to smoke. Thus, Hume is confused when he says that reason is the slave of the passions, because reason would need to figure out which passion to obey. Fourth, many of the activities, traits, and relationships that we intuitively consider part of a meaningful and worthy life (e.g., knowledge, excellence, friendship, virtue, and even autonomy) often do not satisfy the desires of their possessors. There is more to human flourishing than safely and freely getting what we desire. What this means is that if, as Pinker claims, the whole point is human well-being and flourishing, then we need to be thoughtful about what it means to flourish. And it is here that autonomy—in its un-Kantian sense—falls flat. It offers only a procedure on protecting the freedom to choose, but no guidance on what constitutes a worthy choice. Now let’s turn to the political point. The report on dignity was authored by a government-constituted body, The President’s Council on Bioethics (Council), which raised Pinker’s concern about paternalism. He indicates at points but ultimately blurs an important distinction when it comes to politics. There is politics in the sense of a group of citizens thinking and talking together, and there is politics in the sense of decisionmaking—decisions that are binding on everyone in a pluralist society. The Council was designed to contribute to both senses of politics. Its mandate calls both for “fundamental inquiry” in contributing to a “national discussion” and “policy advice.” Kass put this in his opening remarks on January 17, 2002, as a mandate to contribute both to “public culture” and to “public policy.” The concern about paternalism applies to the second sense of politics as binding or coercive decisions. But even here Pinker’s concern is overblown insofar as it applies to the Council. It, like most advisory bodies, has had very little “impact” on public policy and its mandate grants it no regulatory or legislative authority whatsoever. Any recommendation coming out of an ethics advisory body must wend its way through the sausage making factory of democratic public policy before it would become the law of the land. These are not philosopher kings, they are philosopher bureaucrats. True, the creation of ethics advisory bodies requires tax dollars so in this minimal sense it is a coercive act to use taxpayer money to support a kind of inquiry that not everyone likes. But this is really small potatoes when compared with other controversial uses of taxpayer dollars, including those that go to the conduct of war. The “theocons” are clearly wrong insofar as they are paternalists. There is something profoundly noble and wise in the liberal restriction on legitimating discourse. The alternative is to make a controversial moral point prevail through laws, which undermines the virtues it seeks to promote by resorting to force rather than persuasion. When it comes to virtue, the reason why one acts (i.e., out of a thoughtfully and freely held conviction or out of fear of reprobation) makes all the difference. Reports such as the one criticized by Pinker are designed to contribute far more to public culture than public policy. Here Pinker would need to offer some other reason, besides paternalism, for why we should not think and talk about human dignity. Perhaps his critique of the concept constitutes a good reason (our energies would be better spent elsewhere), but of course he can only make this critique by engaging in the discussion. Certainly such reports should be representative and balanced, and Pinker is right to note the failures of the Council on this score. Macklin or another mainstream bioethicist should have been included. This point about openness distinguishes democratic public culture from public policy decisions. The first is governed by a principle of inclusion—all relevant perspectives should be consulted. The second is governed by a principle of restriction. Only certain forms of discourse—those thought to be neutrally justifiable without appeal to substantive visions of the good—are allowable. Mainstream bioethics is based on this principle of restriction. Since the first U.S. federal-level bioethics committee, it has imagined the task of bioethics as one of consensus, which can be achieved by limiting dialogue to autonomy, risks, and justice. The idea, just as with political liberalism, is to leave matters of the good to personal choice. The liberal restriction on justificatory speech means that a market-driven technological existence is nearly certain to be our fate. We are bound to continue the permissive if not enthusiastic political strategies that have given rise to our present technological condition, because the bar is set pretty low—as long as a technology is not unduly harmful (and in many cases even this does not seem to matter), it can be sent to the market where individuals can decide whether or not to adopt it. Of course, one problem is that we may not really have such a range of choice as we may like to believe—a technological imperative often works to thwart the freedom or autonomy of citizen-consumers. For example, how free would we really be to choose enhancements if everyone else is doing so, thereby ratcheting up the requirements to succeed in society? We cannot so easily privatize our “personal” decisions about the good life. This makes even the un-Kantian notion of autonomy squishy—something the communitarians have made great hay with. But more pressing is the question of the kind of awareness—the conceptual resources and moral vocabulary—we bring to bear on our decisions. This is where the work of previous committees offers only silence. Their emphasis on autonomy and risk only ensures the conditions in which safe and free decisions can be made. This is obviously important, but the larger question we need help with as citizens of a technological world creating new and perplexing choices is: which decisions are better than others and why? This is the question that the Council worked to explicitly address in its reports. We can and should take issue with the way it does so, the concepts it uses (such as dignity), and the conclusions it reaches. This is precisely the kind of fundamental inquiry and discussion that the Council hopes to spark with its work. But we are not defending liberalism if we shut down this kind of thicker way of thinking and talking altogether. The Council is, rather, squarely within the liberal tradition at least insofar as it stems from Mill’s arguments that we ought to reason with one another when we disagree on substantive issues and that we owe it to one another to help discern what is truly valuable from what is not. The choice we face is not whether to take up the substantive questions of human flourishing or leave them aside through recourse to a neutral proceduralism. There is no avoiding these substantive questions—they will be decided one way or another. If all we have is mainstream bioethics, then the decisions will be made solely on our unreflective preferences. The promise of the Council’s deeper inquiry is that we—as free individuals—will make our decisions with deepened insight. The greater danger in our age of technological enthusiasm is not a theocratic paternalistic backlash. It is rather that in failing to talk about anything but risks and rights, we will begin to think that way as well—unreflectively adopting a narrowly hedonistic and utilitarian habit of mind. As Carl Elliott (1999) wrote “by agreeing that we cannot impose on others our assumptions about meaning and ultimate purpose, we run the risk of failing to think about them at all.” This is why Kass argues that our salvation lies not in the hope that wise men will relieve us of the burden of our freedom in order to mold us to the true pattern of human good. Rather he argues that “In liberal democracy, and especially in liberal education, lies the last best hope of mankind” (2002, p. 52). Of course liberal democracy is only our last best hope if it is conceived of as a counter-weight to rather than an extension of the market. It is only something hopeful if it is a public arena in which we reflect on and improve our desires rather than merely express them.
- Adam Briggle
May 16, 2008 at 6:26am
I have often thought that Pinker's writing while initially engaging, is generally sloppy once you start to think about it. This article, sadly, is no exception. First, a couple of factual errors (or were facts altered to make a case?). William May is not a philospher in the narrow, secular sense, he is a theological ethicist. As the former president of the Society of Christian Ethics, it is highly unlikely Kass fired him from Council on bio-ethics, in an attempt to "replace [him] with Christian affiliated scholars"! Makes me wonder.... Then there is weakness of Pinker's argument. Pinker critizes dignity because it is so "slippery." This reveals more about his inability to give an idea a sympathetic hearing than any inherent weakness of the concept itself. He says, "We read that slavery and degredation are morally wrong because they take someone's dignity away. But we also read that nothing you can do to a person, including enslaving or degreding him, can take his dignity away." This "conumdrum" is easy. Human beings have inherent dignity and we can violate this when we misuse them. Pinker's wording of this creates a problem where there is none. The relativity of all concepts, including concepts of human dignity and personal autonomy, is easy enough to think through. This goes with the human condition and inheres in the very nature of moral reasoning, I think. His criticism dignity is harmful is positively hillarious because he confuses the ethical concern that we respect basic human dignity with the pretensions of the powerful that violate human dignity in the name of some other center of value. As a progressive, I disagree with some of the stands of the President's Council on bioethics. Even I like eating ice cream cones and approve of birth-control. Some stands of the President's Council are wrong precisely because they violate human dignity!
- ray
May 16, 2008 at 1:16pm
Human dignity is the reason human autonomy matters; the former is the latter's foundation. We don't care as much about the autonomy of animals and plants because we don't think they have the same dignity. Thus when autonomy would undercut dignity (and thus undercut its own foundation) we do and must limit it in order to preserve it: We cannot permit people to sell themselves as fodder for cannibals, for example. Pinker falls into the common error of assuming that current humanistic conventions will endure even if we remove their foundations, like the cartoon figures that keep merrily running past the edge of a cliff, over an abyss, until they look down.
- Richard Stith
May 16, 2008 at 3:13pm
"...bioethics has done just fine with the principle of personal autonomy" What gives "personal autonomy" value? The fact that Kant, Macklin, and Pinker say so? "...government-sponsored bioethics does not want medical practice to maximize health and flourishing..." Who and what defines "health and flourishing" Is it objective? If so, why? "...because all human beings have the same miniumum capacity to suffer, prosper, reason and choose, no human has the right to impinge on the life body and freedom of another..." Why? For what reasons? The problem is that Kantian philosophy was totally unable to stem Germany's descent into barbarism last time. Kant probably needs allies. A properly specified concept of human dignity might help if the Right is not too intellectually slothful to produce one. Dissing human dignity may well represent a wonderful way to pre-program society for some very vicious social outcomes. I doubt an Albert Schweitzer would be so ready to dismiss it out of hand.
- Impre1
May 16, 2008 at 5:28pm
It was my mother, still, I thought the last time I saw her alive after nearly 12 years in the Rockland County, NY, Nursing Home. She sat in the bed propped up by the pillows behind her and turned towards me as I walked through the door. Her eyes widened and her mouth opened. A wordless moan was all I heard. Alzheimer's had taken away language, at last. She held out her hand to me. Little more than an 80 year old infant, she reached toward someone she knew. I took it and asked God to bring her home to Him, soon. "Don't you ever pray that prayer," the woman told me, the woman suffering and soon to die from brain cancer, "You don't know and won't know until you see her in her glory what God is doing to her, with her and through her." Shortly after the woman died. Shortly after my mother died. Another woman I know died recently. She had suffered three hip replacements. A victim of Alzheimer's, too, she couldn't remember the instructions about proper postures and kept painfully dislocating her titanium joint. The Doctors finally gave up and she spent her last year or so unable to walk, confined to a wheelchair, painfully cheerful and worried that others would be depressed to see her at last "growing down", after she had all these years been growing up. Another woman I know spent four years taking care of her aged mother who died only a year ago full of so many diseases it would take a book to merely list them. She delighted her two grandsons, though, and they delighted her. Unable to walk, always in pain, she spent her days, and most nights because she could not sleep well, asking God to have mercy on other people. Are these the people you seem to refer to with your three dots at the end of your short comment, the people who "inhabit", like vermin inhabit a dump, the nursing homes of the world? Better, then, to kill them since they no longer have what was never there, dignity? Better then to examine ourselves and why we want them killed. Deny dignity to one kind of person and you deny it to everyone.
- Peadar Ban
May 17, 2008 at 10:06am
I must have read a different article First, Pinker never entirely dismisses the notion of dignity either as a concept or as something to be valued. What he states, rather cogently, is that the concept of dignity is an insufficient basis for establishing a framework or benchmark through which the morality of biomedical decisions can be definitively judged, and that the essayists in the compilation do not contradict this assumption. Indeed, they acknowledge that as a concept dignity is "squishy". Let us take the case of the embryo. Diogenes says: "Why then is the language of "dignity" threatening to Pinker? Primarily because the concept of dignity has played a role in arguments against certain particular practices like cloning and embryonic stem-cell research. Pinker not only supports such practices but calls them "ethical no-brainers." He doesn't see any moral question here because he assumes that there isn't any violation of autonomy or any lack of respect for persons involved." Do you notice what he has done here? He has elided a notion of "dignity" with "morality" without bothering to define dignity as a concept or how the practices in question compromise "dignity" of stem cells or embryos or humans in general. I will go further: When dignity is used in this manner it is almost always a shorthand for Catholic teaching on life issues. It is a secular stand in for religious dogma. I believe that is Pinker's point.
- Barbara
May 17, 2008 at 12:18pm
Pinker is not quite sure what “human dignity” means. His last sentence negates his entire thesis – letting millions of people needlessly suffer and die “would be the biggest affront to human dignity of all.” Agreed. Webster’s defines dignity as “the quality or state of being worthy” and cites the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” The fact that some groups use the term to support programs Pinker finds objectionable doesn’t make the term uselessly vague. He cites with approval “Macklin argued that bioethics has done just fine with the principle of personal autonomy--the idea that, because all humans have the same minimum capacity to suffer, prosper, reason, and choose, no human has the right to impinge on the life, body, or freedom of another.” Why not? Because we assume the dignity and worth of each individual. Not dignity in the sense of having one’s behind covered in a hospital smock, nor in the sense of being dignified and formal, or the other trivial, non-philosophical uses of the term. The dignity and worth of each human being is the assumption underlying the guarantees in our Bill of Rights, in the concepts of one-man-one vote, in our demand for civility, respecting the rights of others, ultimately in the Golden Rule and Kant’s Categorical Imperative. Pinker dislikes the policies packed into the word “dignity” by the theocons and the Catholic Church. Father Neuhaus doesn’t speak for the Catholic Church, nor is his agenda “a Catholic agenda.” Consider how the words “human dignity” in the Catholic Bishop’s Pastoral Letter impart a connotation that would gladden the heart of secular liberals. In Economic Justice For All, the Bishops argued that all persons have human dignity, and they derive it from God. But whether this dignity and worth (or if Pinker prefers, “personal autonomy”) derives from God, the Enlightenment, J.S. Mill, Kant, Rawls, our Bill of Rights, acts of Congress or decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court is not as important as what the concept entails. Here is a summary of the Catholic Bishops’ notion of the consequences of dignity: “13. Every economic decision and institution must be judged in light of whether it protects or undermines the dignity of the human person. The pastoral letter begins with the human person….We judge any economic system by what it does for and to people and by how it permits all to participate in it. The economy should serve people, not the other way around. 14. Human dignity can be realized and protected only in community. In our teaching, the human person is not only sacred but social. How we organize our society -- in economics and politics, in law and policy -- directly affects human dignity and the capacity of individuals to grow in community. The obligation to "love our neighbor" has an individual dimension, but it also requires a broader social commitment to the common good. We have many partial ways to measure and debate the health of our economy: Gross National Product, per capita income, stock market prices, and so forth. The Christian vision of economic life looks beyond them all and asks, Does economic life enhance or threaten our life together as a community? 15. All people have a right to participate in the economic life of society. Basic justice demands that people be assured a minimum level of participation in the economy. It is wrong for a person or a group to be excluded unfairly or to be unable to participate or contribute to the economy. For example, people who are both able and willing, but cannot get a job are deprived of the participation that is so vital to human development. For, it is through employment that most individuals and families meet their material needs, exercise their talents, and have an opportunity to contribute to the larger community. Such participation has a special significance in our tradition because we believe that it is a means by which we join in carrying forward God's creative activity. 16. All members of society have a special obligation to the poor and vulnerable. From the Scriptures and church teaching, we learn that the justice of a society is tested by the treatment of the poor. The justice that was the sign of God's covenant with Israel was measured by how the poor and unprotected -- the widow, the orphan, and the stranger -- were treated….we are challenged to make a fundamental "option for the poor" -- to speak for the voiceless, to defend the defenseless, to assess life styles, policies, and social institutions in terms of their impact on the poor. This "option for the poor" does not mean pitting one group against another, but rather, strengthening the whole community by assisting those who are the most vulnerable…. we are called to respond to the needs of all our brothers and sisters, but those with the greatest needs require the greatest response. 17. Human rights are the minimum conditions for life in community. In Catholic teaching, human rights include not only civil and political rights but also economic rights. As Pope John XXIII declared, ‘all people have a right to life, food, clothing, shelter, rest, medical care, education, and employment.’ These means that when people are without a chance to earn a living, and must go hungry and homeless, they are being denied basic rights. Society must ensure that these rights are protected. In this way, we will ensure that the minimum conditions of economic justice are met for all our sisters and brothers. 18. Society as a whole, acting through public and private institutions, has the moral responsibility to enhance human dignity and protect human rights. In addition to the clear responsibility of private institutions, government has an essential responsibility in this area. This does not mean that government has the primary or exclusive role, but it does have a positive moral responsibility in safeguarding human rights and ensuring that the minimum conditions of human dignity are met for all. In a democracy, government is a means by which we can act together to protect what is important to us and to promote our common values. 19. These six moral principles are not the only ones presented in the pastoral letter, but they give an overview of the moral vision that we are trying to share. This vision of economic life cannot exist in a vacuum; it must be translated into concrete measures. Our pastoral letter spells out some specific applications of Catholic moral principles. We call for a new national commitment to full employment. We say it is a social and moral scandal that one of every seven Americans is poor, and we call for concerted efforts to eradicate poverty. The fulfillment of the basic needs of the poor is of the highest priority. We urge that all economic policies be evaluated in light of their impact on the life and stability of the family. We support measures to halt the loss of family farms and to resist the growing concentration in the ownership of agricultural resources. We specify ways in which the United States can do far more to relieve the plight of poor nations and assist in their development. We also reaffirm church teaching on the rights of workers, collective bargaining, private property, subsidiarity, and equal opportunity.” Fundamentalist, conservative Catholics took issue with the Bishop’s 183 page letter, claiming that that the Church had no business meddling in economics. Michael Walzer in a keynote address (1994) before the American Jewish Congress, wasn’t alarmed by Catholicism’s use of dignity. He observed: “We might learn something here from American Catholics. Consider the bishops’ letters on nuclear deterrence and economic justice. Powerful, strongly reasoned, and richly referential statements, they are of interest to the general public and, indeed, were circulated to the general public, but they draw on a distinctly Catholic tradition of natural law theorizing, and they are meant to be used as educational texts within the Church.” Honest argument demands that one refute the strongest position of one’s opponent, not the weakest. There are many good reasons why I am an apostate Catholic, but the ranting of a few theocons are insufficient to discredit an entire religious faith. A critique of the divine authority of Hebrew or Christian Scriptures would at least go to the heart of the matter. The idiosyncratic interpretations and applications of their scriptures by fundamentalist Christians, Catholic or otherwise, and Jews, are easy and tiresome targets dogmatic secularists delight in attacking, but those masturbatory exercises don’t address the initial assumptions of Judeo-Christian faiths, nor the complexity of the role of religion in American life. I doubt that a liberal Pinker would oppose the Bishops’ economic goals – that does not make him a Catholic, and conversely, the fact that Neuhaus was critical of his Bishops and of the Pope’s criticism of the Iraq War, doesn’t make him a non-Catholic. If Pinker rejects Biblical justifications for an ideal shared by most liberals, the dignity and worth of each human being, let him read Dworkin, Rorty, or any of the philosophers heretofore cited for more comforting secular justifications. While I share Pinker’s contempt for the uses to which Kass and his colleagues applied “human dignity,” I am bewildered by his meandering attack on that phrase and Catholicism, in lieu of an analysis of their programs. There are enough flaws in the Church’s view of birth control, abortion, stem cell research and end of life problems to warrant an extensive analysis without seeking to discredit the concept of human dignity in all contexts
- Robert Bertholdo
May 17, 2008 at 6:05pm
Sometimes I miss having a subscription to TNR, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I agree with Pinker, sometimes I....no, I agree with Pinker.
- rishy
May 18, 2008 at 8:10pm
While Pinker's analysis does contain a couple of factual errors, they are not crucial to his argument. The fact is, as I've argued at length elsewhere, no one has ever established that such a property as human dignity (as opposed to dignity in the everyday sense of composure, admirable bearing, proper - not excessive or offensive - pride, and so on) even exists. Related properties do exist, of course: vulnerability to physical and psychological suffering, rationality, self-consciousness, awareness of ourselves as having a past and future, the capacity to reflect on our values. These things are of moral significance, but various non-human creatures possess at least some of them. For all we know, there may be other creatures in the cosmos that possess all of them. Conversely, there are entities, such as early human embryos, that are genetically human but do not possess any of these morally-significant properties.
- Russell Blackford
May 19, 2008 at 11:52pm
A few people come to mind when thinking about dignity (the state of being worthy of honor or respect); for example Gandhi, the 1st secretary of the UN, Socrates, ... The other meaning of dignity (the inherent worthiness of human beings) is problematic. Consider the 20th century in which human population increased 400%. Every problem has been caused directly or indirectly by this unprecedented increase, among which 150M killings, genocides, ecological destruction, etc. In addition, we destroy species all around us. Collectively and individually we can be described as reckless, arrogant, stupid, self-centered ... Talk about human dignity deflects attention away from honest acknowledgment of our abundant shortcomings and is, plausibly, the ultimate arrogance.
- Dennis de Champeaux
May 21, 2008 at 10:29am
Dennis is kidding, right? Hitler and Stalin were just dealing with the problem of overpopulation, and lucky for us these clever problem-solvers weren't inhibited by any notion of "intrinsic human dignity"? I'll ask again what I asked earlier: Which position is more likely to be open to abuse, possibly resulting in arbitrary ideological manipulation and illiberal oppression: A. Respect is due to every human being on account of their intrinsic dignity. B. Respect is due only to those who have certain mental or physical capacities or fulfill some desirable function in society.
- Just Wondering
May 21, 2008 at 1:39pm
All persons have human dignity, and they derive it from the flying spaghetti monster.
- Kane Esse
May 21, 2008 at 2:14pm
Years ago, my friend Lillian was so badly eaten up with cancer that she was puking feces. Oregon didn't have the Death with Dignity law at that time, so she was unable to do anything but allow her mother to wipe the shit off her chin. I wonder how those bioethicists would square that scenario with dignity, by any definition. If they are so convoluted in their thinking that they are able to pull it off, I can only say, "give me dignity or give me death."
- Marilyn Burge
May 21, 2008 at 5:12pm
John K says "I for one am unhappy that MY tax dollars are use to promote the religious dogma of atheistic scientism" Well if not believing in god is a religion then not playing baseball should also be a sport. Evidently from his/her response John K knows about logical fallacy.
- pkkm
May 21, 2008 at 5:52pm
silly question for Mr. Kass: When your homeboy Jesus fed 5,000 (not including women and children, who didn't count back then) of his listeners outside, was that not considered eating in public and therefore shameful? I mean, seriously.
- sciencestewart
May 22, 2008 at 2:12am
silly question for Mr. Kass: When your homeboy Jesus fed 5,000 (not including women and children, who didn't count back then) of his listeners outside, was that not considered eating in public and therefore shameful? I mean, seriously.
- sciencestewart
May 22, 2008 at 2:15am
"In that sense, being a human being is a biological status." Who says so? You? It is rather difficult for me to afford a fertilized egg (a zygote) with the status of a human being. It has no brain. It has no spinal cord. It has no nerves. It has no eyes. It does obtain its own nourishment. It is incapable of independent movement. It has no autonomy. It is incapable of reproduction. Now, IF it were implanted and allowed to come to term, it MIGHT become a human being. But that is not the same as saying it IS a human being. Potentiality is not actuality. Consider the following scenario: I have here in a tank of liguid nitrogen a human nucleus, and also a batch of enucleated egg cells. Within this tank lies the potentiality of a human being. All I need do is introduce the nucleus into the egg cell, implant the resultant zygote into a willing (read: autonomous) female, and allow it to come to term. So...does the tank have rights? Does the nucleus have rights? Do you one better. In the not-too-distant future, somebody will be able to synthesize DNA de novo from a sequence database, hang the resultant nucleic acid strands on a protein scaffold to construct chromosomes, insert those chromosomes into a nuclear shell, and construct a living human zygote. It would all come out of the database. Is the database a human being? It has, in principle, no less potentiality for becoming a human than a zygote in a petri dish. Just a few steps removed. I'll do you one still better. What about my fingernail clippings? Someday (a bit further off), somebody will be able to clone embryos from many types of somatic (non-germ) cells. The technical challenges are daunting, but are not insurmountable. So. Do my fingernail clippings have dignity? Of course not. No more than a zygote or a blastocyst in a petri dish. Confusing a zygote with a human being is like confusing a blueprint with a building. They are not the same thing. The only way to argue that human life begins at conception is to assume that some sort of invisible human essence takes up residence in the zygote at that moment. That's what we otherwise call a soul, and it's a religious/spiritualist construct. This may have a role in your personal decisions and ethics, but it can have no part in public policy.
- Sullydog
May 22, 2008 at 7:09am
Responding to "question", this Kantian notion that we must always treat people as "ends" instead of "means" is antithetical to many aspects modern society. When a company hires an exectutive and gives her a high paying job, they do so because they think the employee will make money for them, not because they care about her self-actualization. The idea of "personal autonomy" is that people should be able to look after their own wellbeing, with the understanding that most of us are okay with being someone else´s "means" from time to time.
- William Pastor
May 22, 2008 at 9:50am
Diogenes, thank you for nailing the point. The author knows full well that as the old saying goes, you can fool some of the people all of the time. Yet he pretends to be unaware that this rule of the human condition will not result in mass abuses of "informed consent." The 21st century is already a paved path to global oligarchy, crushing out middle classes worldwide, one commodity price increase at a time. As more people become unable to even maintain a basic standard of living, how many will sell themselves into genetic experiments to keep a roof over their heads? Take a desperate soul and a slickly lawyered-up document for "informed consent", carry it several thousand ruined but socially expendable lives down the road, and voila! we've discovered ways to keep some rich people alive and healthy for another ten years. Even worse is the potential for mass cultural change. I'm not one to use movies to make a point but occasionally one film nails it. The film Gattaca shows us the world we're asking for with our informed consent, where a "natural conception" is frowned upon for the social disadvantage it brings to its resulting human.
- Jerry Cote
May 22, 2008 at 10:10am
Nice opinion piece. Can we get Pinker's view on the "science" of Climate Change?
- Anton
May 22, 2008 at 10:21am
Just Wondering, the answer to your question is B. We are simply heading for B and there is no turning back. I am about to move to the US midwest, away from New Jersey, because of the money-and-power-uber-alles mindset of this place I was born and raised and once called home. God help you if you get chronically ill around here. gov corzine could propose a "leave the sick in the mountains to die" initiative and gain enough votes for his re-election on that alone from these sick selfish SOBs. Perhaps the people of western Illinois will someday be no better than those of this NorthEast cultural cesspool, but for now, I've known their kindness and it remains intact.
- Jerry Cote
May 22, 2008 at 10:34am
Umm, Mr Pinker? Josef Mengele. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mengele
- paul a'barge
May 22, 2008 at 11:04am
Pinker says that it "probably" won't become a runaway train. That word "probably" undoes everything he just said, and means that just anything could happen, and leaves him a loophole as big as the exploding Hindenberg.
- Toppy
May 22, 2008 at 11:29am
What the hell are you people even talking about?
- agave
May 22, 2008 at 12:12pm
"Big Science"? what in the world does that even mean? western culture is doomed and it isn't because of "the libruhls". science is not a point of view.
- mygoodness
May 22, 2008 at 1:04pm
Why is this on the front page? Does a liberal magazine really want to be seen as trumpeting the non-existence of human dignity? You may take issue with Kass' specific proscriptions, but his idea, that we should slow down and re-examine scientific 'advances' to make sure that they don't damage the concept of dignity has merit.
- Whitney
May 22, 2008 at 1:11pm
From first hand experience, if you want to really see a loss of dignity, watch your father and other relatives succumb to Alzheimers.
- RD
May 22, 2008 at 1:38pm
Jeez. Why can't Bush stack this committee with free market fundamentalists instead?
- inkadu
May 22, 2008 at 1:51pm
Using the President's Council's investigation into "human dignity" in order to argue against the utility of the concept of "human dignity" in bioethical debates is a straw man. That a concept is abused and warped in its definition to advance an argument is no inherent reason to discard the use of the concept in general. I might agree that "autonomy" and "informed consent" are sufficient pillars of bio-ethics - if the definitions and applications of these terms weren't such bastardized versions of themselves. Consider the debate of sex-selective abortions - that is, a woman deciding to abort based on the sex of the child alone. If a woman in China insists to me that she is making an "autonomous" decision to abort her child if it is a girl, but not if it is a boy - is that *truly* an "autonomous" decision, or was it a socially constructed one given credence by a mere *label* of autonomy? I would argue that to have *true* autonomous decisions, they must be cabable of being made in an environment of mutuality/respect/equality (even mutual "dignity"). Only then can a decision be considered "autonomous" rather than socially costructed. So, if I agree that "autonomy" is a sufficient foundation for bioethics, it is only because it exists in a pre-existant environment of dignity (of some definition which is another debate entirely).
- Simeond
May 22, 2008 at 2:12pm
A cell in culture is alive. By Kass' argument, there would be no research, there would be zero research, lest we violate the rights of that cell. No wonder Leon Kass, before turning to bioethics, first failed as a biologist.
- Research Scientist
May 22, 2008 at 3:48pm
Here's a question for you. Is steroid use in athletes wrong? If the answer is yes, how is manipulation of genetics to enhance cognition and strength any different? This goes back to the idea of fairness. Is it fair for someone to go to the gym 3 times a week to be equal in size and shape to some fat f*** who takes a pill and becomes Mr. Universe? Are we even allowed ethically to treat our bodies as upgradeable machinery? Taking steroids for medicinal use is a different matter, just as genetic modification to fix a defect. But that's a very slippery slope (and maybe no slope at all) to giving the treatment wholesale to anyone who wants enhanced abilities.
- JWL2672
May 22, 2008 at 3:54pm
As a person of faith, I find Mr. Pinker's anti-religious rhetoric insulting. People of faith should have a place at the table of bioethics discussion. The problem here is not perspectives of the religious, but that the deck was stacked by the Bush administration and thereby the conversation impoverished. As a liberal evangelical I can tell you that there are many perspectives among Christians regarding bioethics and all need to be heard along with mainline and catholic perspectives as well as non-Christian traditions and those whose faith is atheism. Mr. Pinker, we are not the monoliths that you believe religious people to be, and that is because you have bought into the religious right's blurring of faith and politics. Many of us believe that religious people need not control the discussion, but we sure as hell believe that we deserve a place at the table. People of faith have valuable contributions to make to our society. What Mr. Pinker needs to realize that the perspectives visited in this report are apparently politically driven, and secondly that even religious people are worthy of respect, perhaps we could even say "dignity." Nah, that'd be stupid.
- David A. Casto
May 22, 2008 at 4:36pm
“Advances like these, if translated into freely undertaken treatments, could make millions of people better off and no one worse off. So whats not to like?”[PINKER] Assuming we live in world in which people don't think they they derive a benefit from being naturally better then others, this preposition made by Pinker might make sense. But when only "some" are being artificially enhanced, cognitively amongst other ways, there will be groups of people who are being made worse off. Specifically, those who might consider themselves naturally elite now might have competition from an artificial elite group enhanced by drugs or other means. What is more undignified then being bested by someone whome you are better then?
- I don't know?
May 22, 2008 at 5:13pm
There is a lot of intellectual dishonesty expressed here. Diogenes complains that Pinker rejects the concept of dignity simply because he is a 19th-century utilitarian thinker who doesn't agree with the substantive results that dignity-based ethics provide. Nonsense. That wasn't Pinker's argument. His complaint is two-fold. First, "Dignity" is not a particularly helpful concept in medical ethics because it is relative, fungible, and harmful. He shows this by offering numerous examples--including Cass's infamous admonition against ice-cream licking--in which invoking dignity leads to often contradictory, undesirable and/or absurd results. The only legitimate response to this redcutio ad absurdum is to show either that dignity ethics doesn't lead to these results OR that it does, but that the results are not in fact contradictory, undesirable, or absurd. So far as I can tell, none of Pinker's critics has even attempted to do so. Second, he offers a deeper theoretical explanation for the poverty of dignity as a foundational concept in medical ethics: "Dignity is skin-deep: it’s the sizzle, not the steak; the cover, not the book. What ultimately matters is respect for the person, not the perceptual signals that typically trigger it. Indeed, the gap between perception and reality makes us vulnerable to dignity illusions." That's Pinker's argument. Now if you want to object, go to it. But ignoring the real argument and simply changing the subject is not very helpful. Let me offer my own take on this. To the extent that dignity is a useful concept it is so only because it acts as a shorthand expression for something more basic: the notion that there is something special about members of the moral community, something about us that, by virtue of what we are--our fundamental ontological status if you will--that confers upon us a certain dignity, the recognition of which demands decent and moral treatment. Diogenes confirms this by asserting that dignity is not necessarily about religious concepts, but is based on the observation that "the something in question is the kind of thing it is." Thus, dignity is meaningful only to the extent that it alludes to this status. But what is this status? Ah, that's where the rubber hits the road. Religious ethics insists that this status is based on a religious concept: the possession of an eternal soul given to us by God. Secular-based ethics insists that this status must be defined in terms of quantifiable properties, such as rationality, self-awareness, sentience, capacity to experience pain, etc. However, and this is what I find intellectually dishonest, defenders of religious ethics prefer not to use such stark language, and instead resort to fudge terms for what they are really talking about, such as "dignity." Sometimes religious-based ethics will instead resort to biological classification as a stand-in for moral status. OF COURSE, an embryo is human in the taxonomic sense that it has a human genetic code and belongs to the species homo sapien. But this is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the conferral of full moral rights. It is not necessary because it is easy to image non-humans possessing moral rights. If we were to discover tomorrow that a species of primate that had been sacrificed regularly in the course of research for the cosmetics industry in fact had cognitive abilities well beyond what we had previously imagined--indeed abilities approaching our own--then the research would surely stop immediately. This would occur without our obtaining any additional information about its genetic classification. It is not sufficient because, despite the fact that activists have worked diligently to stop the use of human embryos in scientific research, they have ignored the fact that fertility clinics routinely destroy thousands of unused embryos. So too, the same activists have generally not lobbied legislatures to make abortion a capital crime punishable by death. If even the defenders of religious ethics do not believe that mere biological classification is sufficient for the conferral of full moral rights, then why should the rest of us?
- Tom Huffman
May 22, 2008 at 5:24pm
It is fitting that William R. suggests that we read an article by Yuval Levin in The National Review for help in evaluating Pinker's article. Levin is the former executive director of the President’s Council on Bioethics. It's yet another example of what I referred to above: a series of ad hominem assertions amid conspicuous avoidance of Pinker's actual argument. For example, he dismisses out of hand the suggestion that the Bush administration has conducted a "war on science" and refers to such claims as an example of "intense paranoia." There is a serious record here which he might have addressed, but offers an off-hand rejection instead. By far the bulk of his criticisms rest on repeated claims that Pinker has simply mis-stated the facts. The problem with this type of argument is that, without extensive quotations and sourcing, it is nearly impossible to evaluate the criticism. The fact is that very few people are willing to conduct the interviews or pour through the hundreds of pages one would have to pour through to determine who is right. So, I picked just one example at random. He suggests with typically ominous implications that Pinker's motivation for writing this "screed" was that he was "grilled" by the committee and this was his chance to met out some payback. Levin provides a link to the nearly 15,000-word transcript, which again, virtually no one will read simply because of its length. I read it. Far from being a "grilling" in which a presumably humiliated Pinker must respond with the viscousness Levin insists his NR essay contains, it is a very respectful, even friendly, exchange of ideas. Some examples: "CHAIRMAN KASS: Thank you very much. A very crisp, clear and interesting presentation." "PROF. GEORGE: Yes. Thank you, Dr. Pinker, for that wonderful presentation." "DR. GÓMEZ-LOBO: This was a very clear and persuasive presentation." "DR. HURLBUT: So I welcome your statements about the difficulty of genetic engineering . . ." "DR. McHUGH: I enjoyed your talk very much. . ." "CHAIRMAN KASS: Thank you very, very much. (Applause.)" Not only does this transcript NOT indicate a grilling in the sense that Pinker would have been offended and feel the need to retaliate in the pages of the New Republic, it borders on a love-fest.
- Tom Huffman
May 22, 2008 at 5:58pm
There seems to be some confusion concerning the term dignity. As I understand the use of the term "Human Dignity" as used in the publication, it applies to the species as a whole. Little wonder that the author finds it a useless term since it essentially is selecting a group to decide for the rest of humanity what their dignity is. The term used in the UN charter refers to individual dignity that must be respected similar to but not quite the same as the term autonomy the author uses. To have a universal "dignity" applied to everyone by one particular group, in this case a group of religious believers would be destroying the individual dignity of the many who do not accept their particular beliefs. Use of group "dignity" is only a term to be used to enforce a particular religious or political belief. Most religious people believe they have found the fast track to to truth. If you are an atheist as I am, I may respect you as a person and some of your arguments if well reasoned and supported by fact but your beliefs have no more more vality for me than a belief in the Great Pumpkin. In fact people of other religions may hold stronger feelings about the validity of you beliefs than I do. I only think they are irrelevant. The Old Testament is a nasty piece of work not much more moral than Mein Kampf encouraging brutality, genocide and self righteousness. I think a debate on the ethics of bio development is a good thing and the religious have as much to contribute as anyone. As long as they can accept that others do not believe they have a hot line to omniscient being that invalidates others beliefs or arguments. In addition all religions have a desire to propagate themselves and strengthen their political power. Otherwise they would not survive. It is not in anyone else's interest. For many years I believed that one of the stains on British history was the disenfranchisement of catholics particularly in Ireland. In fact I still believe that. But some context is needed. I was in St Peters last week and something I saw there stuck out. There was a statue representing truth. At its feet was a map with with all the nations of Europe named except Britain which was pictured as a thorn in the statues toe. Across the ailse were the tombs of some of the Stuarts, the family that wished to force the British back to catholicism and impose absolute monarchy. As with any organization the church craves power which is the opposite of liberal democracy and so as an institution does not deserve special privileges for its members or organization. This does not mean that reasonable people including the believers cannot find some agreement as to what is moral in regard to bio study. An other example everyone can agree that carving up people's corpses is undignified yet we have agreed to have it done for medical study yet we also can all agree that that the Nazis experimentation in the concentration camps was immoral. Regards
- Jonnm
May 22, 2008 at 6:54pm
Diogenes: "But the issue itself isn't about religious zealotry..." Yes, I think it is. That and the ignorance it breeds. Although the author tends towards extremes in pleading his case, the simple take home message, at least to me, is the misuse of the word dignity. Who in the world would argue against human dignity? No one. The Bush admin is infamous for such misuse of language. Remember the Clean Air Act? Now who wouldn't want clean air? But that wasn't what it was about, was it? Neither is this divisive wedge issue that is an affront on science being packaged as Human Dignity. It is not really about human dignity, and I think that is the point of the opinion piece. I can understand theological arguments against the use of embryonic stem cells, but one should be aware that there are more types of stem cells than embyonic. More to the point though, is the fact that grant funding for the biomedical sciences has fallen in most disciplines from the near mid 20% range during the Clinton admin, to less than 9% today. That is not enough to sustain present grant continuations never-mind new and inventive work. Record numbers of labs are going out of business. This is the war on Science. The dignity one loses to progressive and ravenous diseases like Alzheimer's is truly a loss of human dignity. I can only wonder what the opinions of those opposing medical research will be when they or their loved ones are afflicted with such a devastating disease. Would you opt to not take any therapeutic intervention that used stem cells during the basic research phase? Nearly every therapeutic treatment in the modern arsenal was once tested in animal models. Do vegans opt to not take pharmaceuticals? The tools to move forward on disease are being constrained, and worse, funding is anemic at best. There is a war on Science. It is a war that uses divisive and misleading terms to push forward. Ironically, those divisive elements are pointed at the religious community to promote their cause, whereas the money saved from biomedical research is being pumped into a war machine that does promote death and human suffering. The use of the word dignity to cover the ulterior motive of suppressing biomedical research, and not just stem-cell research, is appalling. Good article, but sometimes misses the point.
- jS
May 22, 2008 at 8:29pm
Steven, the Left doesn't even understand the concept of dignity. Not to mention, honor, courage, manliness, etc. So, I would consider the the title of your article an apt anthem for the entire Leftist Generation of the past forty ought years.
- ChanRobt
May 22, 2008 at 8:48pm
Tom Huffman says: "Religious ethics insists that [moral] status is based on a religious concept: the possession of an eternal soul given to us by God. Secular-based ethics insists that [moral] status must be defined in terms of quantifiable properties, such as rationality, self-awareness, sentience, capacity to experience pain, etc." This is a positivistic dichotomy which ignores the actual history of philosophy and the genuinely available theoretical alternatives. There is a philosophical tradition which, without any appeal to religion, suggests that moral status (call it dignity, personhood, whatever) is not a matter of a "property" of a thing (much less a "quantifiable" property), but is a matter of the thing's being the kind of thing it is. Some people call this "intrinsic human dignity", but it can be called personhood, moral worth, or the status of rights-bearing, or anything else. Whatever you call it, though, Pinker is ignoring it.
- Diogenes
May 22, 2008 at 9:42pm
"Dignity" is only an impossible or "slippery" concept to grasp if you, like Pinker, spend all your time arguing theorycraft and not applying the obvious. The retarded, non-Aryans, and Jews specifically did not have dignity in Hitler's pure society. Pinker is the same moral midget who argued that infanticide is justifiable for similar reasons as he does here. Dignity is "fungible" you see. It doesn't really count unless Pinker says so. His entire argument hinges on the individual comments of one member on the board, and he further twists himself into knots confusing two obviously different definitions of dignity. He first confuses immodesty and awkwardness with indignity with his ridiculousness about rectal exams (what is undignified about having a physician examine your rectum for medical problems? It may be immodest and awkward, but it hardly removes you of your dignity.) In Pinker's world definitions that aren't conducive to his mad science are too "slippery" to pin down. I doubt given his beliefs about the legitimacy of infanticide he has any difficulty discerning what is right and wrong, and it is more that he actively chooses the destruction of life in the name of "advancing science." I imagine he also finds "ethics" difficult and "slippery" to define. You see, it's hard to argue dignity is relative, fungible, and indeed "stupid" as the title alleges unless one is the most blatantly partisan supporter of "advancement" at any human cost.
- BKennedy
May 22, 2008 at 11:20pm
An multicellular human embryo is an immature human being. A fertilized human egg, or zygote, is a very immature humam being, a member of the human species not potentially but actually. An unfertilized egg, or gamete, is not actually a member of a the human species, although a member of the human species could come to be from it through a natural process. A skin cell, although alive and a part of a human being, is not actually a member of the human species, although we could imagine that some artificial process could generate a human being from it (e.g. through cloning). This much is simple biology, and there is no reason to try to argue with these facts. (Nor is there reason to try to blur the clear biological distinction between a human being and a non-human being by supposed hard cases like fingernail clippings or clever apes.) The further question, not determined at all by the biological facts, is whether everything that is a biological organism of the species homo sapiens has moral worth, is deserving of respect, etc. There are reasonable arguments that suggest the affirmative; there are reasonable arguments that suggest the negative. Those who argue the negative typically look for something other than biological classification as the basis of moral worth (such as viability, consciousness, ability to feel pain, intelligence, or some other, usually empirically detectable, property). Those who argue the affirmative need point to no further property, since their position is just that moral worth attaches to the status something has as a living human organism. That is all that is meant by "intrinsic human dignity". (For those who use the term this way, it is the steak, not the sizzle, although Pinker refuses to entertain that possibility; but that doesn't matter because the word "dignity" is not essential to the theoretical position anyway.)
- Diogenes
May 23, 2008 at 12:16am
Tom Huffman: (1) There might be reasons not to abuse other creatures short of attributing human dignity to them. And (2) in fact many people are convinced that the routine destruction of embryos by fertility clinics, as well as abortion, amounts to homocide and as such is immoral (they just don't have to hold that everything that has the moral status of homocide needs to receive identical legal treatment). So your argument attempting to prove that biological status cannot be treated as a necessary and sufficient condition for moral status fails.
- Diogenes
May 23, 2008 at 12:26am
For those addicted to 'human dignity':
If you are not willing to develop guidelines to commit euthanasia on triply handicapped babies that will only suffer, get out of the way.
If you keep denying the right to euthanasia to someone desperately wanting to die, you lack fundamental insight in the human condition, get out of the way.
If you do not want to develop guidelines for end of life euthanasia you allow the medical system to milk Medicare - against the wishes of the patient - with the excuse they might be sued by the family. If so get out of the way.
Pregnant parents testing positively for a costly abnormality should bear the expenses themselves if they object to abortion. If you disagree, get out of the way but put your money where your mouth is first.
This whole discussion about dignity is way too esoteric thus far ...
- Dennis de Champeaux
May 23, 2008 at 12:29am
Dennis proves the point nicely: those who oppose the idea of intrinsic human dignity are those who want to justify some forms of homicide.
- Diogenes
May 23, 2008 at 9:59am
To Jerry Cotes: Of course we all serve each other in a myriad of ways. The idea is that you should not treat another human being as ONLY a means and nothing else. Yes, a corporation hires an executive to make money for them; if she does not deliver, she may be fired. But are there no limits on how they may treat her in pursuit of making money? Can they require her to work 24-hour days, to neglect her family, to lie, cheat and steal? Yes, some corporations act like that, and we say that those companies do not treat their people with dignity. The moral and legal limits on what they can do are recongitions that she is a person beyond her money-making capacity for them. So you have not at all debunked the notion of dignity.
- Gypsy Boots
May 23, 2008 at 3:40pm
It's amazing how much mind-share all this wacky magical thinking has in America. Really - that a clump of cells with no consciousness magically somehow has 'dignity'. Just amazing! Let's hope these dark-ages dumbos don't succeed in dragging everyone else down with them. Sullydog has the best comment, which bears repeating: "In that sense, being a human being is a biological status." Who says so? You? It is rather difficult for me to afford a fertilized egg (a zygote) with the status of a human being. It has no brain. It has no spinal cord. It has no nerves. It has no eyes. It does obtain its own nourishment. It is incapable of independent movement. It has no autonomy. It is incapable of reproduction. Now, IF it were implanted and allowed to come to term, it MIGHT become a human being. But that is not the same as saying it IS a human being. Potentiality is not actuality. Consider the following scenario: I have here in a tank of liguid nitrogen a human nucleus, and also a batch of enucleated egg cells. Within this tank lies the potentiality of a human being. All I need do is introduce the nucleus into the egg cell, implant the resultant zygote into a willing (read: autonomous) female, and allow it to come to term. So...does the tank have rights? Does the nucleus have rights? Do you one better. In the not-too-distant future, somebody will be able to synthesize DNA de novo from a sequence database, hang the resultant nucleic acid strands on a protein scaffold to construct chromosomes, insert those chromosomes into a nuclear shell, and construct a living human zygote. It would all come out of the database. Is the database a human being? It has, in principle, no less potentiality for becoming a human than a zygote in a petri dish. Just a few steps removed. I'll do you one still better. What about my fingernail clippings? Someday (a bit further off), somebody will be able to clone embryos from many types of somatic (non-germ) cells. The technical challenges are daunting, but are not insurmountable. So. Do my fingernail clippings have dignity? Of course not. No more than a zygote or a blastocyst in a petri dish. Confusing a zygote with a human being is like confusing a blueprint with a building. They are not the same thing. The only way to argue that human life begins at conception is to assume that some sort of invisible human essence takes up residence in the zygote at that moment. That's what we otherwise call a soul, and it's a religious/spiritualist construct. This may have a role in your personal decisions and ethics, but it can have no part in public policy.
- commenter
May 23, 2008 at 4:03pm
Richard Stith has it backwards: It is autonomy that is the basis for dignity, which is why dignity is so subjective and should be left to individuals to define for themselves.
- Ken Motamed
May 23, 2008 at 4:08pm
Pinker did not dismiss human dignity. He merely suggested that no one can force his/her idea of dignity on someone else. Should I be able to tell you that licking an ice cream cone is undignified? How about getting a colonoscopy? Or an experimental treatment? Is there any doubt that the religious right is trying to force its view of morality on the rest of us under the guise of "diginity"?
- Ken in Seattle
May 23, 2008 at 4:22pm
"Liberal Evangelical", Mr. Casto? You just added to my list of oxymorons.
- KM
May 23, 2008 at 5:04pm
The Bush administration's attack on science by using religious fanatics is truly dangerous, particularly the rise of Catholic influence. Even more scary is the loading of the Supreme Court with Catholic jurists. It was the influence of the Catholic Church in its attack on Senator Kerry (a Catholic who supported abortion rights) that helped Bush win in 2004. Kerry received a smaller percentage of the Catholic vote than Gore did in 2000. The uniting of Catholic bigotry with evangelical bigotryis a real threat to US democracy.
- oxheadone
May 24, 2008 at 11:03am
Although I’m no fan of Steven Pinker’s “innate modularity theory” of mind and linguistics, I thought his levelheaded analysis of our human dignity and bioethics is exemplary!—BTW, I read this nice article in print—Author “Gods, Genes, Conscience” (iUniverse, 2006) and “Decoding Scientism” (work in progress since July 2007).
- Mong H Tan, PhD
May 25, 2008 at 12:15pm
I would argue that the questions that have come to light require the reassessment of the entire world order which constitutes reassembling states of people by their individual fundamental beliefs in order to resolve the problems of totalitarianism. A new international system of order must be installed to protect the rights of everyone to pursue what gives their lives meaning. The principle behind this world order is no different from that of the existing world order, it just breaks down the historical forms of government in order to create ones that truly have their peoples interest in mind. While this proposition seems like it would be controversial, in affect, the implications of not assesing our world order are much more controversial.
- will gerould
May 26, 2008 at 8:38pm
Dr. Pinker does not call cloning and stem cell research 'ethical no brainers'. He was referring to Kass's (and the Catholic Church's) reaction to in vitro fertilization in the early years of this practice. Now one hardly hears a peep out of anyone on this matter. It has become an ethical 'no brainer'. Perhaps the hot button topics now under discussion will become no brainers in the future, perhaps not. This just proves Pinker's point that human dignity is subjective and ever-shifting. i agree, the argument shouldn't be about 'dignity', should not revolve around religious zealotry, but should center on the question of whether humans are harmed or die as a result.
- mims carter
May 26, 2008 at 10:02pm
I'm interested to know exactly in what regard taking a pharmacological cognitive enhancer would be ethically different from a parent paying for 1 on 1 extra tuition. Both confer 'unfair' advantage, yet most parents would (rightly in my opinion) seek such an advantage for their children. I don't think unfairness constitutes a sufficient downside to overrule a libertarian policy presumption.
- Richard Holt
May 28, 2008 at 4:47am
These discussions around dignity (and discussions around discussions of dignity) are red herrings, and are intended to be red herrings that postpone the real issue: pharmaceutical companies' revenue streams. These firms make money from ongoing treatments and therapies for diseases/ailments, not from cures. Repugnant but true. To the extent that biotechnology can obsolesce diseases/ailments – and that's the goal – biotechnology threatens these revenue streams. Until these firms can solve for a business model that profitably accommodates cures, expect further delays and accompanying human suffering. Total political donations 1990-2008 from these firms is more than 2:1 to Republicans (via opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=H04, opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=H4300)
- Pete
May 28, 2008 at 5:25pm
"...bioethics has done just fine with the principle of personal autonomy" What gives "personal autonomy" value? The fact that Kant, Macklin, and Pinker say so? Human autonomy is the underlying principle of democracy. I'm not sure why anyone is questioning the implicit acceptability of this principle.
- Tim Church
May 28, 2008 at 6:25pm
Ah, I see the fundies and the freaks are out tonight. Let me break it down for you slower-witted members of the audience: 1) Religion deserves *no place* at the table, when it comes to science and bioethics. Feel free to worship as you want, but leave your personal beliefs out of discussions dealing with empirical fact. If you don't like it, too bad. Go sit in a corner and pray, and leave this discussion to the rational. 2) Dignity is a human construct, and inherrtantly non-empirical. Ergo, it does not constitute a sufficient excuse to influence either scientific or bioethic policy. In other words, in regards to these topics, it is truly worthless. 3) Theocons don't give a damn about either religion or science. Their main goal has been - and will always be - the accumulation of power. Power over resources. Power over rights. Power over minds. The scientists know this; the religious boosters, on the other hand, are either completely unaware of this, have deluded themselves into ignoring this, or are truly to stupid to know better. 4) Life does not begin at conception. Eggs are alive. Sperm are alive. Life (as an overall concept involving living things), as it currently exists, never completely ends; it simply begets more life. Some die, but new (and old) permutations always carry on. Thus, the old canard life begins at conceptions means absolutely nothing. 5) Cells are not people. Even cells with recombined genetic materal do not qualify as people. Nor do individal human cells, which meet the exact same criteria fundimentalists extol as "a unique life" by their very genetic makeup, which, like all cells contain at least 5-10 mutations (and thus changes from the "original" genetic template) making each one unique. Likewise, the potential to be human does not make one human. Thus, in the grand sceme of things dandruff, HeLa cell cultures, and blastocysts (or zygotes, if you perfer a different developmental phase) are all the same: living, but not human. All three have the same genetic potential. All are alive. None are us. (Though some may argue that HeLa is actually better then us, as it is about as close to immortal as we humans can become). 6) Fundies need to go home. This is an issue which requires the input of thinking adults, not salvering sychophants. Likewise, the republican boosers can also leve the building. This isn't a left v right issue, nor is it a liberal vs conservative one. It is simply about humans being able to do two things: I) Use the tools and knowledge they have gained to help themselves in any and all ways possible II) Control the destiny of the one true item they own - their own bodies. That's it. That's the secret. It all about progress. Progress vs. fear. Progress vs. intelligence. Progress vs. theology. Progress vs. anything and everything that would stand in its way. In short, its all about being able to make our short, complicated lives better, or being prohibited to do so are any arcane and stupid reason anyone can think of. And if you ar truly against this - the beterment of all mankind - what the hell kind of person are you in the first place?
- Cogito Ergo Sum Dei
May 29, 2008 at 1:15am
Maybe the best article yet by Pinker. I add the word "theocon" to my working vocabulary and include "dignity" with other highly glorified, yet intrinsically worthless ideals such as patriotism, faith and god.
- HappyHominid
May 29, 2008 at 8:01pm
Did you read all 9 pages of the article or give up when you saw that Pinker was critical of religionists intervening where they don't belong. You aren't sure why? Pinker was very CLEAR "why".
- HappyHominid
May 29, 2008 at 8:04pm
Ad "Cogito' (#77): (1) "Religion deserves *no place* at the table, when it comes to science and bioethics." Is that a fact, or an opinion? If it is a fact, what is your empirical evidence, if it is a moral opinion, then what makes your anti-religious moral opinion superior to "religious" moral opinion? And who says talking about human dignity is a "religious" issue anyway? Were the Stoics religious? Was Socrates? (2) "Dignity is a human construct, and inherrtantly non-empirical." Like all concepts of morality, it is not fully "empirical", but that doesn't make it a mere "construct", any more than the concepts of necessity, equality, beauty or stupidity are constructs. These are all concepts that we can use to make true judgments about the world, albeit judgments that cannot be verified only by sense observation without appeal to other dimensions of human cognition, which give us insight into reality beyond what the sense organs alone are able to report. (3) "Theocons don't give a damn about either religion or science." Accepting for the sake of argument the fairness or relevance of your term "theocon", how do you know what theocons really care about? (4) The "old canard" that "life begins at conception" is shorthand for "the life of a biological organism begins at that organism's conception," or, in the case most of us care most about, "human life begins at the conception of the human organism." This is not only not meaningless, it is an incontestable truth of elementary biology. Before it's conception, a given organism did not exist (though something else may have existed and been alive); after it's conception, that organism existed; when that organism dies, it exists no longer (though something else may exist and be alive which is not that organism). (5) "Cells are not people." Most cells aren't. But at one point you were just a cell; so that cell was just a person, namely, you. So more precisely, we could say: a skin cell or a gamete is not a person, but a human zygote is an immature, single-celled human being. (See 4 above.) (6) "Fundies need to go home." Again, fact or opinion? And just who are these "fundies"? Have you read the Dignity report? Is it about "fundies" or "religion" or is it about rational ethics? Who does more to shut down rational discourse about morality, philosophers who discuss dignity, or positivists who refuse to? [Have I wasted my time arguing? Perhaps #77 was actually a satirist, wildly exaggerating the poor reasoning and ugly bigotry of Pinker's article?]
- Diogenes
May 29, 2008 at 10:41pm
Diogenes please come out of your cowardly anonymity and identify yourself here so that you can be sued for libel.
- Dennis de Champeaux
June 1, 2008 at 12:16am
Dennis, please explain. Do you really take offense at what I said in comment #64? Abortion and euthanasia involve the intentional killing of human beings (at least in the biological sense of organisms of the human species), and so they satisfy the definition of homicide. Your comment #63 spoke favorably of abortion and euthanasia, and you recognized that "human dignity" might be invoked against such practices. I intended no attack on your person, I thought I was simply summarizing your own insight: if someone wants to defend certain forms of homicide (like euthanasia or abortion) then he needs to reject the idea of intrinsic human dignity.
- Diogenes
June 2, 2008 at 1:34pm
from the UK, Bush and his committees seem very odd, Pinker explains why. I always look forward to a Pinker appearance or publication and enjoyed his wit and wisdom again. Take a life-prolonging pill Steven and keep us informed and entertained for a long while yet!
- robert orr
June 3, 2008 at 6:18am
Professor Pinker's problem with "dignity" is that he doesn't understand it. Either that, or his comment that "Sex is undignified" just leaves us feeling very sorry for him and his wife.
- upmayo
June 4, 2008 at 7:22am
We enjoyed studying your interesting and rhetorical article. We found it provoking from the moment we read the title “the stupidity of dignity”. We believe human dignity is an innate value to every individual. It is deep enough to encompass principles like autonomy and respect for persons. We acknowledge the difficulty in defining human dignity, but recruiting anecdotal analogies of historical perceptions, medical examinations, and religious repression does not necessarily revolve the bioethical challenges. Students in the Msc Programme in Bioethics, King Abdullah International Center for Medical Research, King Saud Bin Abdula Aziz University for Health Sciences, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
- Students of MS in Bioethics, KSA
June 5, 2008 at 9:05am
Dignity an innate value of an individual? I agree that eating and shitting and a few other features are innate. Not dignity. Dignity is what >we< (individuals and/or collectively) can decide and (dis)agree on. More general: all of ethics can be >>defined<< by individuals as well as by communities/ societies. A fantastic freedom!! There is a little price. Personal ethics that deviate too much from a communal one can entail (capital) punishment. No need to quibble. Over and out.
- Dennis de Champeaux
June 7, 2008 at 12:16am
Dennis, you forgot the higher price for your version of morality -- even human beings who haven't developed or no longer have the ability to articulate a "personal ethics" (so are not even in a position to agree with or deviate from "communal ethics") may find themselves eliminated. All it takes is you denying that they count (i.e. you saying that severely immature or handicapped people don't have "dignity"). Again, though, I applaud you for seeing the connection between the defense of forms of homicide and the denial of intrinsic human dignity.
- Diogenes
June 12, 2008 at 4:16pm
Here a mixture of some topics - I will keep it short: (1) Ethics is not only contingent, but there is no guarantee that the society/ majority gets it right. The reverse is more the case. Just consider the preceding century where we collectivively and individually overpopulated the planet and created havoc worldwide. (2) Our individual and collective stupidity is so pervasive that crowning ourselves with dignity is a major embarrassment. (3) The Dutch government has been in turmoil last week about embryo implantation. There is agreement to test, among others, for Huntington disease and to not implant such an embryo. One down for rationality. If you object, please get lost for all eternity. But then they want to test also for a nasty version of breast cancer. A party in the government objects, because it would entail the slippery slope of designer babies. IdiotsAreUs IMNHO. (4) Testing for every nasty condition should be allowed ... (5) Mammal bodies have intrinsic defects because evolution does only good enough "designs". For example, air and food pipes cross in the neck which can have lethal consequences. A perfect goal for genetic engineering, right? And there are many other serious defects. (6) Space travel requires existence in zero temperature, gravity and pressure. Massive engineering is required to pull that one off. (7) The dignity discussion is just a massive waste of time and distract from way more pressing topics to be discussed.
- Dennis de Champeaux
June 19, 2008 at 2:23am
Sir, I have read nearly ever word you have ever written, and have had no pause to part company but for this one thought you may wish to consider further --". . . millions of people with degenerative diseases and failing organs would needlessly suffer and die." Not only does this seem like an overly dramatic statement, and uncharacteristic, but it fails your own test of empiricism. Dying is not needless, and we must all, eventually, face that, regardless of our viewpoint. I could reference your own views, as previously published, but space and time do not permit. That one nit-pick aside -- well said.
- Tom712
June 20, 2008 at 11:42pm
Dennis, you are either just missing the point or intentionally trying to change the subject. To insist on intrinsic human dignity is not to deny that people people are stupid, imperfect, weak, sinful, etc. It is rather a necessary reminder, given our stupidity and sinfulness, that we must respect others, no matter how imperfect or weak they are. Even Pinker agrees that all persons deserve respect. Saying that all persons have dignity is just a way of expressing this. You aren't really disagreeing either, only showing how willing you are to deny personhood or dignity to certain kinds of weak, immature, or poorly developed human organisms. Again, this only confirms my point: those who are uncomfortable with the notion of intrinsic human dignity are those who want to justify forms of homicide.
- Diogenes
June 23, 2008 at 8:08am
(1) No, the contingency of ethics is ultimately >not< grounded in empiricism. Burning one's hand on the stove is painful indeed, but one can overrule that experience and burn one's hand deliberately. Also, just consider the atrocities that societies considered justified in our history and to this day. Hence ethics is really up to us. Here an analogy to twist one's preconceptions. The rules of chess have been defined by us and can be changed at any time as we see fit. Ethics is in the same boat. (2) We do assume, in a mature democracy, that decisions made after exhaustive deliberations will be honored by everyone. Labeling, for example, abortion as homicide is libel and I invite TNR to take action against anonymous parties. (3) BTW, if you are addicted to "dignity", are you making exceptions for mass/ serial murderers, and similar misfits? If so, where is the boundary and how is >the boundary< delineated? (4) The average citizen in the Netherlands consumes (during the life time) more in social services than what is paid in taxes. Thus the average citizen is >economically< parasitical and hence the Netherlands is a lower class society. Other statistics support the claim that all welfare states have become lower class societies in the 20th century. Pinker reports that cognitive dimensions, among which IQ, inherits statistically. Combining this factoid with some other statistics yields the conclusion that the IQ-bell-curve has shifted to the left during the 20th century, which explains why we have produced moronic societies and thereby why majorities are economically parasitical. No, one can NOT blame the individuals. The unconditional entitlements in the welfare societies made the choices of individuals rational behavior. The diginity discussions are yet another distraction for addressing an >intrinsically< sorry state of affairs in our societies ...
- Dennis de Champeaux
July 6, 2008 at 12:21am
Dennis, for an individual rights guy you sure are quick to ask the power of the state to punish people who say things you don't like. Anyway, it is interesting to me that in your comments the denial of human dignity is so directly linked to moral relativism, and what sure sounds like a desire for social engineering, eugenics, or worse. ("Get out of the way"?!) As a freedom-lover myself, I much prefer to stand with those whose will-to-power is limited by a sense of moral absolutes, a humility in the face of human dignity, and a dedication to rational argument.
- Diogenes
July 7, 2008 at 9:37pm
If you define human life as being a ball of unconscious, undifferentiated cells with no personality or ability to experience ANYTHING! “You will further find that it takes no religious view (but merely an understanding of biology) to discover that the embryo is a human life--it has human parents and its own DNA” Just like my liver cells. They had a mommie and a daddy and their own different dna. I think they are people as well! “recall that the Declaration of Independence is out of bounds for you, theocratic document that it is, with its grounding of rights in a Creator and all” Well, the deistic god of the declaration of independence gave me rights. I thank him for creating the universe 13.7 billion years ago and not interfering in the universe since! Thank you for my rights, o extremely distant creator!
- Chris mankey
August 17, 2008 at 2:08pm
O clear-headed Chris mankey, please instruct us: Who has rights? How can you tell something has human rights? It is sufficient that something be a human organism to have human rights? Or do only some human organisms have human rights? If some human organisms don't have rights, is it other human organisms that get to make that determination? Do you really confuse human organs (like livers) with complete human organisms (including embryos) -- is your understanding of biology really so poor, or is thus just a conveniently affected confusion that lets you pretend you can't see that a very immature human being is indeed a human being?
- Diogenes
October 6, 2008 at 12:12pm