02 October 2011

Human Dignity In Bioethics

A few weeks ago I linked to a piece of my own here in which I argued that the reality of human dignity is a condition necessary for a meaningful concept of human rights, and that a Christian account of human dignity is solidly grounded in the image of God in human beings. Nothing new in either point but I hope that my analysis of exactly what about the image of God entails human dignity will prove helpful.

Enter Zack Calo. In his recent piece, Human Dignity and Health Law: Personhood in Recent Bioethical Debate (abstract here), Calo does not enter into an exegetical or even theological argument but instead focuses on how different views of the nature of human dignity play out in the specific context of genetic engineering. He does so by engaging in a close reading of relevant works by Ronald Green (Babies by Design), George Kateb (Human Dignity), Gilbert Meilaender (Neither Beast Nor God), Robert George and Christopher Tollefsen (Embryo). Michale Sandel (The Case Against Perfection), and Jürgen Habermas (The Future of Human Nature).

Calo begins with the claim that "human dignity proved largely uncontroversial in the human rights context because it served as an unexamined background assumption that undergirded the established values of the human rights movement." Perhaps this is so by comparison to the focus of his piece, bioethics, but I believe even in the field of human rights conflicting understandings of dignity have equally "accentuated deep and fundamental ethical cleavages concerning the nature of personhood." But this is little more than a quibble.

Calo's readings of such a broad array of contemporary thinkers from diverse and in fact opposing perspectives is impressive. I made use of Meilaender's Neither Beast Nor God and found in Calo a like-minded interpreter. Calo also creates a useful typology of bioethical approaches: those grounded in human rights (Green and Kateb), those who start with a distinctively religious notion of human dignity (Meilaender), and those who begin instead with a non-religious perspective on human dignity (George/Tollefsen, Sandel, and Habermas). I have long found a great deal of value in the works of Habermas and I personally found Calo's development of his and Sandel's works the most interesting of the lot.

While I argued that explication of what accounts for human dignity can be an important wedge in discussions of human rights, Calo suggests otherwise, at least with respect to bioethics: "If one thing has become clear from current bioethical debate, it is that there should be modest expectations for the role of human dignity." But perhaps our differences are only a matter of style rather than substance because Calo goes on to remark that "human dignity is better employed as a vehicle for advancing a critical dialogical encounter, rather than as a locus for the reconciliation of competing anthropologies."

Whatever may ultimately be my disagreement with Calo, I can and do heartily commend his piece to everyone interested in the best approaches to the issue of human dignity in bioethics.

1 comment:

  1. Leon Kass makes similar arguments in his numerous writings (Kass was chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics). See http://www.marshillaudio.org/resources/article.asp?id=170 for a brief overview.

    So does Peter Lawler, but from a political science perspective.

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