The Stupidity of Dignity
The USA’s President’s Council has produced a collection of essays as an attempt to place dignity as a central concept in bioethics.
However, Steven Pinker points out that dignity is a tradeable commodity and not a sound basis for a system of ethics. We may find that having someone sticking their figure up our rectum to be undignified but we grin and bear it in order to detect signs of prostrate cancer.
Spincer points out that in an earlier essay bioethicist Ruth Macklin who described dignity as 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. Once you recognise the principle of autonomy, Macklin argued, “dignity” adds nothing.
It was Macklin’s essay that goaded the President’s Council to acknowledge the need to put dignity on a firmer conceptual foundation. However the collection of essays, from mostly the religious side of the fence, should sound alarm bells because rather than being 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.”
