Personal Autonomy or Human Dignity

The Stupidity of 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.

Macklin couldn't be more wrong. Autonomy is part of dignity, but dignity is a much greater concept. The greatest difference between the concepts of "dignity" and "personal autonomy" is that the former is afforded to all humanity, including the unborn, the comatose, the elderly, and the severely handicapped. Personal autonomy is afforded only to those able to exercise consent.

Macklin and Pinker both claim that the term "dignity" is a squishy, subjective notion. In the philosophical and theological tradition from which it is born, the term is anything but squishy and subjective. Every human being has dignity because he or she is human - period. Dignity is inherent in the very nature of humanity. The only reason the term becomes "squishy" in the minds of Macklin and Pinker is that they have rejected the rock-solid foundation of human nature. Personal autonomy is supposed to be less subjective than dignity because autonomy can be observed through the exercise of consent. However, very often in science one has to admit that just because something cannot be observed does not mean that it is not there (for example, we have never observed a black hole, yet the existence of black holes is universally accepted among scientists). The fact that human dignity cannot be observed does not make it subjective. The fact that the standard of personal autonomy would turn some classes of human beings into non-persons who can be used and discarded for the benefit of the rest of us makes this concept very squishy to my mind.

Furthermore, Pinker's understanding of dignity is quite emaciated. Perhaps dignity as he understands it is indeed squishy. We'll take a look at his definition of dignity next time.