Neither Beast Nor God

The Dignity of the Human Person

Gilbert Meilaender

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781594032578
• eBook ISBN: 9781594034404
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Appeals to "human dignity" are at the core of many of the most contentious social and political issues of our time. But these appeals suggest different and at times even contradictory ways of understanding the term. Is dignity something we all share equally, and therefore the reason we all ought to be treated as equals? Or is it what distinguishes some greater and more admirable human beings from the rest? What notion of human dignity should inform our private judgments and our public life?In Neither Beast Nor God, Gilbert Meilaender elaborates the philosophical, social, theological, and political implications of the question of dignity, and suggests a path through the thicket. Meilaender, a noted theologian and a prominent voice in America's bioethics debates, traces the ways in which notions of dignity shape societies, families, and individual lives, and incisively cuts through some common confusions that cloud our thinking on key moral and ethical questions. The dignity of humanity and the dignity of the person, he argues, are distinct but deeply connected—and only by grasping them both can we find our way to a meaningful understanding of the human condition.

CHAPTER ONE

Speaking of Dignity

OFFERING HIS OWN explanation for the confusing mixture of works he had written—some published pseudonymously, others under his own name—Kierkegaard distinguished between two quite different senses in which his writing had focused on “the single individual.” In the works written under different pseudonyms, the individual whom he had in mind was a “distinguished person”—distinguished, that is, by human excellence of one sort or another. But in the writings published under his own name, which he called “edifying” works, the individual was “what every man is or can be.” Hence, “‘the single individual’ can mean the one and only, and ‘the single individual’ can mean every man.”¹

From one perspective individual human beings are members of a species that is distinguished from other species by certain characteristics. The species lives on, though its individual members die (and, indeed, probably must die for the health of the species). Almost inevitably, some individual members of the species display more fully or more excellently than others its distinguishing characteristics. In so doing, they give us some sense of what a human being at his best can be, and we may sometimes speak of their conduct as dignified. They are distinguished from the rest of us and offer an image of the flourishing of our full humanity. In so flourishing they display what I will call human dignity.

This way of thinking about dignity invites us to attend to at least two different but significant matters. The first grows out of the fact that human dignity is the dignity of a particular sort of creature, who is neither the “highest” nor the “lowest” sort of creature we can imagine. Indeed, the term dignity here is really just a placeholder, a shorthand expression for a certain vision of the human. Human beings are strange, “in-between” sorts of creatures—lower than the gods, higher than the beasts. Not simply body, but also not simply mind or spirit; rather, the place where body and spirit meet and are united (and reconciled?) in the life of each person. Thus, Augustine writes, in a sentence that succinctly captures the point, God “created man’s nature as a kind of mean between angels and beasts.”²

This characteristically human dignity, this in-between status, does not always satisfy us, however, and so we may seek to be either more or less than human. As Filostrato, a physiology professor, says in C. S. Lewis’s fantasy, That Hideous Strength: “What are the things that most offend the dignity of man? Birth and breeding and death.”³ Unsatisfied with our condition, we hope to reshape and master these central aspects of life and become more than human. Death must be conquered—or put off as long as possible. Reproduction must become the work not of the body but of will and mind—and need no longer involve animal copulation.

The motives underlying such attempted mastery need not be obviously evil; indeed, they will almost surely include a desire to relieve the pains and disappointments of the human condition. But the price paid is what Lewis elsewhere called an “abolition of man,” a subverting of the character of our in-between status as beings marked by “not just reason or will, not just strength or beauty,” but by “integrated powers of body, mind, and soul.” ⁴

Filostrato was not mistaken to suppose that competing visions of human dignity come most clearly into focus when we think about birth, breeding, and death. How we come into being and how we go out of being are of central importance for any sense of what it means to respect (or undermine) human dignity. But human dignity also involves more than how we are born and how we die. To be born of human parents is to be connected in particular ways. We are located; we are not just free-floating spirits or citizens of the world. We do not spring up like mushrooms from the ground, and we therefore have special attachments to some, even obligations to which we never consented and which we never chose. These special attachments, loyalties, and obligations are part of what it means to be a human being. They too are integral to our dignity in the time we are given between birth and death—a time marked, usually, by growth and achievement, but also, usually, by failure and loss.

When dealing with either birth or death, our greatest temptation may be to use our powers of mind and soul to control and master our bodies—to be more than human. In much of life that comes between birth and death, however, we are increasingly tempted to see our problems not as invitations to mindful mastery but as bodily problems to be medicated away—as if we were less than human. Life’s difficulties become not an occasion for development of character and virtue but “medicalized” problems calling for a prescription.

Thus, in different ways we may think of ourselves not so much as the peculiar in-between creature in whom nature and spirit meet but as either “just body” or “just spirit.” Neither of these is bad in itself. An animal is not a bad thing, nor is an angel or a god. But we are none of these, and human dignity is to be found in the kind of life that honors and upholds the peculiar nature that is ours, even if there is no recipe book that can always show us how properly to unite and reconcile body and spirit. Much of our insight into that nature is the fruit of our Christian and Jewish traditions; yet, what faith seeks and sometimes finds is insight into a true humanism—into the meaning of human dignity. Human life is marked by characteristic powers and capacities, but also by characteristic limits and, even, weaknesses. We need to honor and uphold that peculiar, in-between character of human life.

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A second, related but different, issue raised for us by the idea of human dignity is all too apparent. Because our life is marked by characteristic powers and capacities, we are naturally inclined to think in terms of comparative degrees of human distinction or dignity—and of some as more dignified than others. Just as some of us flourish, displaying humanity at its fullest and best, others of us have, at most, a kind of basic humanity that falls far short of the full development of human possibilities—“an anthropological ‘minor league.’ ”⁵ And, in fact, it is not hard to imagine that some of us might so lack or lose the characteristic human capacities as to seem to have lost human dignity almost entirely. Thus, Peter Singer wonders why we should affirm the dignity of all human beings, “including those whose mental age will never exceed that of an infant,” when “we don’t attribute dignity to dogs or cats, though they clearly operate at a more advanced mental level than human infants.” ⁶ If dignity is a comparative concept, grounded in certain capacities, which may or may not be present, some human beings will have greater dignity than others, some will conduct themselves in a more dignified manner than others, and some may have lives utterly devoid of human dignity. That is how we think if we think of an individual as “the one and only”—as distinguished by certain characteristics (or, of course, in a negative mode, by the lack of those characteristics).

Kierkegaard thought of the individual not only as “the one and only,” however, but also as “every man.” At issue here is not human dignity but what I will call personal dignity. The equal dignity or worth of the individual person has, in our history, been grounded not in any particular characteristics but in the belief that every person is equidistant from Eternity—and that, as Kierkegaard says, “eternity . . . never counts.”⁷ The God-relation individualizes. When all are equally near (or far) from God, all other distinctions are radically relativized, and one can even say that “all comparison injures.”⁸

But we cannot simply set human and personal dignity side by side and say no more. For if we think primarily in terms of human dignity we may be tempted to suppose that the equality embedded in the concept of personal dignity is a fiction (if perhaps a useful one). It may seem that some of us—those whose capacities are less developed or, if once developed, are now fading and diminished—have a lesser status than others in whom the most characteristic human qualities are more fully displayed. Some people’s lives—those in a persistent vegetative state, those suffering from severe dementia, those who are profoundly retarded, those who have achieved little and whose lives display no characteristically human excellences, those whose cultural achievements are few, those who have done evil deeds and show no remorse—will lack the dignity that characterizes genuinely human life and perhaps even no longer be “worth” preserving. Thinking only of human dignity, and of the unequal ways in which it is displayed in our lives, we may turn naturally to the quantitative language of “value” and conclude that the lives of some people are “worth” less than the lives of others.

If, on the other hand, we think first in terms of personal dignity, we are likely to emphasize individual equality, affirming—or insisting —that every person, simply by virtue of his or her humanity, is one whose dignity calls for our respect. Nothing we do or suffer can deprive us of the dignity that belongs to each person. We may offend against that dignity or fail to recognize it, but we cannot destroy it or blot it out. To think this way is to honor and uphold not simply a true humanism, but also a true personalism.

Still, we must, as I noted, do more than simply set human and personal dignity side by side. One of them must, at least to some degree, have a transforming effect upon the other. I suspect we can see such a transforming effect in the following example: Discussing the topic of murder, and replying to an “objection” (as the structure of the Summa calls for such replies), St. Thomas Aquinas writes, “A man who sins deviates from the rational order, and so loses his human dignity [dignitate humana]. . . . To that extent, then, he lapses into the subjection of the beasts.”⁹ Contrast this with the words of Pope John Paul II in the encyclical letter Evangelium Vitæ, released in 1995: “Not even a murderer loses his personal dignity [dignitate].”¹⁰

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The seeming divergence between these two important and influential statements within the same (albeit long and extended) tradition of thought is striking. Aquinas seems to think that the murderer, by turning against what reason requires of us, becomes more beast than man—losing the dignity that characterizes human beings, the rational species. John Paul II, in a context discussing the death penalty in general and Cain’s murder of Abel in particular, does not seem to think of “dignity” as something that can be lost by human beings, even when they act in ways that fall far short of the excellences that mark human nature. The divergence is, I think, only “seeming,” however, for what we see here is the way in which this tradition of thought has regarded personal dignity as fundamental and allowed it to transform to some extent our understanding of human dignity. For the most fundamental truth of all is that, as Kierkegaard noted, “eternity . . . never counts.”

We have, then, two concepts of dignity—human and personal—that invite our reflection. Human dignity has to do with the powers and the limits characteristic of our species—a species marked by the integrated functioning of body and spirit. We may differ, individually, in the way or the degree to which we manifest those characteristics and that distinctively human wholeness, but the specific dignity of the human species would be diminished or lost if we were utterly to transcend the limits of our bodies (and become something more like a god) or if we were to think of our bodies not as the place of personal presence but (as for beasts) things to be manipulated for purposes entirely external to them. The first of these ways of subverting our human dignity has been called, in our moral tradition, pride; the second sloth.

Personal dignity, by contrast, has to do not with species-specific powers and limits but with the individual person, whose dignity calls for our respect whatever his or her powers and limits may be. It is closely tied to our affirmation of human equality. Each concept is needed and merits our attention, but it is personal dignity that provides a cantus firmus underlying and sustaining the whole.

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CHAPTER TWO

Being Human

NEAR THE BEGINNING of his Nicomachean Ethics, as Aristotle probes the question of what is “good” for—that is, what will fulfill—a human being, he suggests that the answer lies in “whatever is his proper function” (more literally translated, “proper work”).¹ That distinctive function cannot, he says, be simply “living” (i.e., nourishment and growth), for that human beings share even with plants. It cannot be merely sense perception, which is shared with the other animals. The distinctive work of a human being, he concludes, must be to live as a reasoning being (“actions performed in conjunction with the rational element” of the soul).²

That is all we need to get us started in this chapter’s discussion of “being human,” but it is important to note one more thing Aristotle says, for it relates to complications to be taken up much later. If the distinctive work that characterizes the human species is, as Aristotle puts it, activity of the soul in conformity with reason, it will, of course, be true that some of us more fully and excellently carry out that work than do others of us. Thus, Aristotle concludes that “the good of man is an activity of the soul in conformity with excellence or virtue, and if there are several virtues, in conformity with the best and most complete.”³ The dignity of being human takes its rise from the work that distinguishes our species; yet, some of us express or manifest that characteristic work more fully than do others of us. How to affirm or hold onto the equality of human persons in the face of this difference will occupy us later.

We need to start, though, roughly where Aristotle did—with “man” himself and the work that characterizes and distinguishes the human species. In articles collected in both The Phenomenon of Life and Philosophical Essays, Hans Jonas explored and developed a vision of what it means to be a living organism and, more particularly, a living human being.⁴ Beginning with a few aspects of his “philosophical biology” will give us an angle from which to think about the dignity of being human.

THE PHENOMENON

Unlike inert matter—dirt, or a rock, for example—which simply is what it is, living things retain their individual existence over time only by not remaining what they are, only by “special goings-on” which “efface almost entirely [their] material identity through time.”⁵ These special goings-on we call metabolism. Organisms remain alive by taking in material from their surrounding environment and using it to produce energy and to fashion materials for growth and repair (and then, of course, by returning to the environment the material they cannot use for these purposes). The very being of the organism consists in sustaining itself by carrying on this work of exchange with its environment; for without such exchanges it cannot continue to “be.”

Thus, the living form, whether of the human body or of less intricately developed organisms, must be distinguished from the materials that constitute it. An organism is “a substantial entity” which nonetheless enjoys “a sort of freedom with respect to its own substance, an independence from that same matter of which it nonetheless wholly consists.”⁶ However mysterious this may seem, it is unavoidable. “Inwardness” is built into the nature of living organisms.⁷ If we were simply to identify the organism with the materials that compose it at any given moment, it could have no continuing identity over ti...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• CHAPTER ONE - Speaking of Dignity
• CHAPTER TWO - Being Human
• Human Dignity
• Personal Dignity
• NOTES
• INDEX
• A NOTE ON THE TYPE
• Copyright Page