Human Dignity in Bioethics

From Worldviews to the Public Square

Stephen Dilley, Nathan J. Palpant, Stephen Dilley, Nathan J. Palpant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415659314
• eBook ISBN: 9781135117627
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics in Medicine

Human Dignity in Bioethics brings together a collection of essays that rigorously examine the concept of human dignity from its metaphysical foundations to its polemical deployment in bioethical controversies. The volume falls into three parts, beginning with meta-level perspectives and moving to concrete applications.

Part 1 analyzes human dignity through a worldview lens, exploring the source and meaning of human dignity from naturalist, postmodernist, Protestant, and Catholic vantages, respectively, letting each side explain and defend its own conception. Part 2 moves from metaphysical moorings to key areas of macro-level influence: international politics, American law, and biological science. These chapters examine the legitimacy of the concept of dignity in documents by international political bodies, the role of dignity in American jurisprudence, and the implications—and challenges—for dignity posed by Darwinism. Part 3 shifts from macro-level topics to concrete applications by examining the rhetoric of human dignity in specific controversies: embryonic stem cell research, abortion, human-animal chimeras, euthanasia and palliative care, psychotropic drugs, and assisted reproductive technologies. Each chapter analyzes the rhetorical use of 'human dignity' by opposing camps, assessing the utility of the concept and whether a different concept or approach can be a more productive means of framing or guiding the debate.

Part I
The Source and Meaning of Human Dignity in Worldview Context

3 A Catholic Perspective on Human Dignity

Christopher Tollefsen

Reference to “human dignity” and “the dignity of the human person” occurs repeatedly in recent Catholic papal and magisterial teaching, beginning roughly with the encyclical Rerum novarum of Leo XIII, continuing in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, and eventually coming to dominate the writings of Pope John Paul II. As a result of that increased emphasis, concern for the idea of human dignity has also come to characterize the scholarly work by Catholics of recent decades that has been devoted to articulating and arguing for that teaching (see, e.g., Gormally 2004; Hittinger 2006; Sulmasy 2007, 2008; Neuhaus 2008; Lee and George 2008). Human dignity, and the overshadowing of that dignity in modernity, are considered the key concepts for an adequate philosophical anthropology, for working out acceptable solutions to contemporary bioethical dilemmas, and, more broadly, for understanding the condition, and even crisis, of man in the contemporary world. It would appear, in fact, that contemporary Catholic social and moral teaching, and even its ecclesiology, is grounded, ultimately, in this very idea.

It is perhaps inevitable that a concept such as human dignity, given, as it is, so much prominence in recent Catholic thought, should be subject to a backlash, both by secular thinkers, dubious of Catholic positions on a host of controversial issues, and even by some Catholics, suspicious of the uses or abuses of the concept within their own tradition. This chapter will investigate the core ideas of the concept of human dignity in Catholic thought and defend that idea against three strands of criticism. The first two are made by secular thinkers, including, most prominently, bioethicists. The first of these secular complaints is that the idea of dignity is, essentially, a species-ist notion, a way of illicitly giving preference to beings like us over nonhuman animals and of attributing excellence that is manifestly not present to beings of diminished or undeveloped cognitive capacity.

The second secular criticism is that the notion of dignity is too vague, and that its vagueness serves as cover for the intellectual deficiencies of the positions it is meant to support. Dignity, on this view, serves merely as a rhetorical device by which conservative Christians, especially Catholics, can help themselves to conclusions to which they are already committed.

A third strand of criticism comes from within Catholicism itself and holds that the modern Catholic idea of dignity is simply mistaken. Robert Kraynak in particular has recently argued that the Catholic “personalism” of John Paul II, Jacques Maritain, John Finnis, and others has been unacceptably Kantian in its outlook, with disastrous consequences, in particular, an increasingly individualistic and subjectivist assertion of rights.

In my dialectical exchange with these three types of criticism, I will articulate a version of the Catholic view on human dignity that does indeed give preference to species membership, but not, I will argue, unreasonably. In consequence, all human beings, even those of diminished or undeveloped cognitive ability, are privileged morally over every subhuman animal, yet are fundamentally equal with one another. I will argue further that, while the idea of dignity can, and sometimes does, serve only as rhetorical cover where arguments are missing, it need not, and that Catholic thought on dignity, especially the thought of Pope John Paul II, is attuned to precisely that which must be articulated in order for the idea of dignity to give birth to substantive moral norms. In this essay, I concentrate especially on norms governing the field of bioethics and, in particular, norms concerning the so-called human life issues such as abortion and euthanasia, norms concerning reproductive technologies, and norms grounding the right to health care. Finally, I will argue that the evaluative foundations and conclusions in which dignity is implicated are indeed best described as “personalists” describe them; and that while they generate robust rights claims, those claims are neither subjectivist nor individualist; the resulting account, I argue, both corrects and complements contemporary liberalism.

The Dignity of the Human Person

I shall begin with the thought of Pope John Paul II, in his Encyclical Evangelium vitae (Pope John Paul II 1995), for there the pope appears to be engaged in a summation of Catholic thought on the subject of human dignity precisely in order to combat the overshadowing of that dignity in modernity, and especially in the medical context. Abortion, euthanasia, and even capital punishment are described as threats to human dignity, and the foundational nature of that dignity for respectful treatment of the human person is reiterated often.

John Paul identifies, in Evangelium vitae, three aspects to the dignity of the human person (Pope John Paul II 1995: nos. 34–38). First, the human person has dignity because of his source: he is made by God, and entirely gratuitously. Second, because of his nature: he is made in God’s image. And finally, man has dignity because he is made for God, a destination the nature of which is transformed in Christ, by whom we are called to share in God’s life, as his adopted sons and daughters. In what follows, I examine each of these key ideas, the understanding of each of which penetrates the understanding of the others. These ideas summarize the pope’s thought, and magisterial teaching more generally, on the core constitutive dignity of the human person, a dignity that is inalienable, and not lost even by actions which are not consonant with that dignity: “Not even a murderer loses his personal dignity, and God himself pledges to guarantee this” (Pope John Paul II 1995: no. 9).

Made by God as a Gift

God is the author of all creation, not only of man. How, then, can man’s creation be special? Gaudium et Spes, from the Second Vatican Council, gives us the answer, in describing man as “the only creature on earth that God has willed for itself” (Second Vatican Council 1965b: no. 20). This raises a natural question: what is it about man that makes it possible for his existence to be willed for itself? The answer to this can only emerge gradually through discussion of dignity in its three aspects, but it is clear from Genesis, and has been held true throughout the Catholic tradition, that God willed the existence of the rest of earthly creation for the sake of man. Gaudium et Spes thus articulates the following view: all earthly creation exists for the sake of man, but man exists for his own sake; and in this is partly to be found man’s dignity.

Moreover, in that willing of man’s existence for his own sake, God can rightly be said to have willed man’s existence, and, of all earthly creation, only that existence, as a gift. God did not need to create man, so man serves no instrumental purpose, unlike the rest of creation, which is created only for the good of man himself. Man’s creation thus is entirely gratuitous. This, too, reflects an aspect of human dignity. But the glory of both this willing-as-gift and the willing of man for his own sake (two interpenetrated notions) are magnified by the fact that the source of the creation is God himself. God who is all good and all powerful is nevertheless capable of creation for the sake of the good of what is created, and the goodness of the creation takes its value, its dignity, from its source as well as from the way in which the source has willed.

Made in God’s Image

Of all the reasons commonly proffered as explaining man’s dignity, the most commonly mentioned is the second—that man is made in the image of God. This claim, I will argue, has both descriptive and normative components; it can only be fully understood insofar as it is recognized to point ahead of man’s given nature to the nature he should take on in action, a nature that is other regarding and eventually to be completed in Christ.

The descriptive component is often, and accurately, understood in the following way: man is made in the image of God precisely because his existence is that of a person. Man, that is, is possessed of reason and will and is capable of rational thought and free choice (for an articulation and defense of this view, see Lee and George 2008). We see this dual emphasis in the documents of the Second Vatican Council: in Dignitatis Humanae, the council writes that our “dignity as persons” is our existence as “beings endowed with reason and free will and therefore privileged to bear personal responsibility” (Second Vatican Council 1965a: no. 2). John Paul similarly summarizes: “The biblical author [in the book of Sirach] sees as part of this image . . . those spiritual faculties which are distinctively human, such as reason, discernment between good and evil, and free will” (Pope John Paul II 1995: no. 34).

Already, in these descriptions, we see anticipation of the way in which the image of God is normative, for reason and free will, in man, are necessary precisely so that we may bear that privilege of “personal responsibility.” This responsibility was identified centuries before by Saint Thomas Aquinas as our participation in God’s eternal law; unlike the rest of earthly creation, which follows God’s law blindly, because made to do so by God, human beings are given a share in divine reason, and the faculty of free choice, precisely so that they may guide and constitute themselves as the persons they are to be in accordance with God’s plan (Aquinas 1920: I–II, Prologue). It is in this active shaping of their own lives in accordance with reason that human beings are like—in the image of—the divine. But the orientation of this power must be identified; that is, what is the substantive content of the deliverances of reason? This question concerns the content of the natural law, a question to which I will turn later in this chapter.

The descriptive content further shades into the evaluative in magisterial and papal reflections on human dignity as those are carried out in light of the first Genesis account. In that account, man is made in God’s image as male and female, and this was a subject of intense interest for John Paul II in his reflections on marriage. In their complementary maleness and femaleness, spouses are uniquely enabled to extend what the Second Vatican Council teaches is perhaps the most important way that human beings image God—namely that they are capacitated, by their personhood, and enjoined, by reason and the divine will, to love. Marital love is a profound imaging of the divine precisely because by it spouses realize a unity similar to that of the unity of the divine persons; they are one flesh, as the divine persons are one God. And they mirror the fruitfulness of the divine love, which goes out from the father to the son, and then from the two in the procession of the Holy Spirit, in the embodying of their love in another, viz., a child. Martial union and fruitfulness are so much like the triune divine life that it is not out of place to speak of the “dignity of marriage,” as we speak also of the dignity of the person.¹

We reach here as well a starting point for the fully normative task of persons insofar as they are made in the image of God, which Gaudium et Spes puts as follows:

God did not create man as a solitary, for from the beginning “male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27). Their companionship produces the primary form of interpersonal communion. For by his innermost nature man is a social being, and unless he relates himself to others he can neither live nor develop his potential.”

(Second Vatican Council 1965b: no. 12)

We find this thought more strikingly articulated as the conclusion of a point already noted: “man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself” (Second Vatican Council 1965b: no. 24).

We see here two things. First, the earlier point about one aspect of man’s dignity being found in his source—that is, God’s gratuitous creation—here is joined to the second point about man’s dignity as being made in the image of God. For God, in creating a being for its own sake, creates that being as able to love—that, we here find articulated, is what it means to be a being capable of existing for its own sake. And it is thus only in loving that man realizes, or fulfills, the nature by which he has dignity. Thus, man’s dignity presents him with a task (Beabout 2004; I will return to this theme later), and we could say that his constitutive dignity—the dignity he has in virtue of what he is—thus sets on man a requirement to strive for existential dignity (Gormally 2004), the dignity of excellence as a being capable of love and self-gift.

A final point should be made about the dignity of man as image of God, to which I will return later as well. It is tempting to interpret the language of “image of God” as it bears on man’s personhood in a purely spiritual way. That is, one might think that it is only as thinking and willing that man is a person in such a way that the body is other than that person. This form of dualism is resisted by the Catholic tradition, as the following passage from Gaudium et Spes makes clear:

Though made of body and soul, man is one. Through his bodily composition he gathers to himself the elements of the material world; thus they reach their crown through him, and through him raise their voice in free praise of the Creator. For this reason man is not allowed to despise his bodily life; rather he is obliged to regard his body as good and honorable . . . the very dignity of man postulates that man glorify God in his body.

(Second Vatican Council 1965b: no. 14)

Made for God

Man, as created in the image of God, is also created “capable of knowing and loving his Creator” (Second Vatican Council 1965b: no. 12). We can discern three levels of this knowing and loving, each of which manifests the dignity of man.

First, even apart from revelation, there are adequate reasons to conclude that a personal and creative God exists who is responsible for not only man but man’s nature, including the reason which makes possible man’s orientation toward his own fulfillment. Thus, a relationship of cooperation is, it may be inferred, offered by God to man: to do as reason requires is to cooperate with God in a project, the end of which is that fulfillment available to man on earth. Thus, a form of friendship with God is offered to man and may be said to be his destiny and, thereby, his dignity. That friendship, moreover, is deeply personal, for God calls each human person to a particular life; this personal call, man’s vocation, has been especially emphasized by recent magisterial and papal documents and is likewise central to man’s dignity.

Second, that offer of friendship is extended, in revelation, to a promise of the Kingdom: men are offered the possibility of everlasting life in a communion with other saints, with angels, and with the persons of the Trinity. This eternal life is, moreover, a bodily life, and the Second Vatican Council alluded to this, in the passage quoted above, in explaining the dignity of man’s bodily life.

Third, the offer is extended once more, in baptism, through which we are not simply cleansed of s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Setting the Stage
• Part I: The Source and Meaning of Human Dignity in Worldview Context
• Part II: The Politics, Law, and Science of Human Dignity
• Part III: The Rhetoric of Human Dignity in Bioethics
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index