The stupidity of dignity
Steven Pinker notes that Bush’s Council on Bioethics has put out a 555-page report called Human Dignity and Bioethics.
This collection of essays is the culmination of a long effort by the Council to place dignity at the center of bioethics. The general feeling is that, even if a new technology would improve life and health and decrease suffering and waste, it might have to be rejected, or even outlawed, if it affronted human dignity.
Yes where have we heard that before…from the archbishop of Canterbury, from the pope, from lots of meddlesome priests.
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.”…Once you recognize the principle of autonomy, Macklin argued, “dignity” adds nothing.
Just what I said! Last November. Twice.
Macklin of course says it much much better.
To invoke the concept of dignity without clarifying its meaning is to use a mere slogan…Why, then, do so many articles and reports appeal to human dignity, as if it means something over and above respect for persons or for their autonomy? A possible explanation is the many religious sources that refer to human dignity, especially but not exclusively in Roman Catholic writings. However, this religious source cannot explain how and why dignity has crept into the secular literature in medical ethics.
Well, maybe it can, actually; words and concepts can cross borders.
Pinker goes on.
Goaded by Macklin’s essay, the Council acknowledged the need to put dignity on a firmer conceptual foundation. This volume of 28 essays and commentaries by Council members and invited contributors is their deliverable…And what it reveals should alarm anyone concerned with American biomedicine and its promise to improve human welfare. For this government-sponsored bioethics does not want medical practice to maximize health and flourishing; it considers that quest to be a bad thing, not a good thing.
Just like the archbishops and cardinals. Never mind what the research could do to end horrible diseases, instead focus on the threat to ‘human dignity’ of research on cells in a petri dish.
Although the Dignity report presents itself as 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.
And then he goes into the details. It’s infuriating stuff; don’t miss it.
The last paragraph makes the obvious and devastating point.
Theocon bioethics flaunts a callousness toward the billions of non-geriatric people, born and unborn, whose lives or health could be saved by biomedical advances. Even if progress were delayed a mere decade by moratoria, red tape, and funding taboos (to say nothing of the threat of criminal prosecution), millions of people with degenerative diseases and failing organs would needlessly suffer and die. And that would be the biggest affront to human dignity of all.
Exactly.
Do these hypothetical non-sufferers and non-deaths also count if we apply the question to Chinese practices of organ harvesting and the use of Nazi experimental records? Of course they do.
The difference is that these situations are agreed (in the west) to be unethical. We have already seen major advances in this research wherein non-foetal cells have been ‘switched’ to behave like the foetal material that was embargoed from research use. Seems the technology is overtaking the poorly-defined ‘dignity’ argument and the general objections of nervous nellies anyway.
And compare with the ‘Precautionary Principle’, and being against animal testing! Activists against GM and drug development have taken the moral high ground and invented a moral imperative that is biased to ‘Do Nothing’. Same for economic and radical tourism development! Yet because in this case the ‘theocons are involved’ the forces of Progress are suddenly more important than what ordinary people may perceive as a risk of ‘runaway’ science.
This is not a well-developed ethical argument, on the anti-theocon side. This is a paper tiger of the forces of reaction.
ChrisPer: Either I don’t quite follow what your argument is supposed to be, or you just committed the most transparent tu quoque I’ve seen in years.
Anyway, here’s one important difference you miss: The precautionary principle is based on an actual argument. You can analyze it, disagree with it, argue against the premises and reasoning, etc. (And I agree that there’s much to be said against it.) In contrast, the theocon reliance on “human dignity” without specification or definition is so much twaddle. The more one reads about their view of “human dignity,” the more evident it becomes that it’s nothing more than persuasive-sounding but empty rhetoric organized around a valor phrase chosen specifically to repudiate questions and criticism in advance: Who could be against human dignity? Except that those who’ve followed the story arc of the Leon “Wisdom of Repugnance” Kass-led Council on Bioethics all know that Kass et al really mean The Human Soul Made Flesh In GOD’s Own Image (tm) or some such nonsense when they write or say “human dignity” – but they try very hard (and sometimes not so hard) to cover that up to make it look like they have arguments instead of unsupported assertions.
That’s important, and it leads me to another difference that your criticism ignores: It makes moral sense to balance potential moral goods versus potential or actual moral evils. Perhaps medicine could be advanced more quickly if researchers just threw human autonomy out the window and subjected whatever humans came under their power (prisoners, the poor and desperate, orphans) to direct human experimentation – but such experiments would clearly be committing a great moral evil. That evil is so obvious you didn’t even feel compelled to explain or discuss it, you just cited a few examples – Nazi medical experiments and involuntary organ harvesting in China. And certainly you’re right: Inflicting pain on and violating the autonomy of innocent persons to advance the welfare of others (actual or potential, present or future) clearly is morally reprehensible.
In contrast, these nebulous concerns about “human dignity” are very much the opposite of clear. Clusters of cells in petri dishes do not have autonomy and they do not suffer. What, exactly, is the moral objection to experiments involving them? The theocon bioethicists would have us sacrifice the health and welfare of billions based on an “ethical argument” which is neither ethical nor an argument – it’s just empty rhetoric grounded in deliberately hidden and wholly specious faith-based premises. The spurious and indefensible equation of cells with human beings is exactly what Kass and company are being called out on by Pinker (and others), and your off-hand implied comparison between those who could be saved by involuntarily harvested organs with those who could be saved by biomedical advances based on stem cell research just repeats that spurious and indefensible equation: Stem cells are people, too!
No. They aren’t, actually. And it’s damned silly to say they are, no matter how much you dress it up or gloss it over or hide it amongst distractions like spurious introduction of Nazi experimenters and illicit organ harvesters into the discussion.
As to your other example: Yes, the animal rights extremists generally rely just as much on pure emotional appeal and empty rhetoric and outright deception as any theocon one could name. So? No one (least of all OB) ever claimed that religious conservatives have a corner on the cheap rhetoric and willful unreason markets.
“We have already seen major advances in this research wherein non-foetal cells have been ‘switched’ to behave like the foetal material that was embargoed from research use.”
Interesting that you put it that way. If we’re not allowed to research embryonic stem cells, how do we know that “converted” adult stem cells have the same capabilities as ESC?
G, I agree with you, but I’m just going to play a devil’s advocate here because I need to clarify these things for myself. You say: “Clusters of cells in petri dishes do not have autonomy and they do not suffer.”
Well, comatose patients don’t have autonomy and don’t suffer either. So?
Wow, solid response G!
Now I don’t agree with the idea that two cells are already human, and the dignity ‘argument’ is as OB says thin and un-developed – but it may still have a few viable cells of a premise ;-).
My chief objection is that the potential lives saved are used to roundly condemn people who – SURPRISE! – are the bad guys of choice for all reasons. I say it is a crap argument, because many forms of serious ethical transgression are potentially usable to deliver lives saved, but we are agreed, I think, that it is unacceptable to commit such even for positive ends. The author OB quotes is therefore NOT making a sound ethical argument with that emotive discussion.
The fact is, you can be as right as you want about when bloody tissue acquires the rights of a human, but if 40% of the opulation disagree with your superior knowledge, their representatives get a place in the discussion.
A pity they can’t argue it worth a damn.
It’s hard to imagine a bigger affront to human dignity than a colonoscopy. Should we debate ending them ?
Certainly not. It might result in making them compulsory.
My $.02: “dignity” is an essential word to describe a lot of people’s personal experiences, but not a good concept to base firm ethical rules on. It’s more poetic/emotional/descriptive than analytical.
I work with survivors of torture and “dignity” is a word that frequently comes out of my clients’ mouths to describe what was taken from them. It’s a useful concept in that sense. But I wouldn’t let meta-ethicists get away with talking about it without first defining it clearly. Especially not notorious gasbags like Kass. OTOH the philosopher Philippa Foot has a pretty clear and useful concept of dignity, as does psychologist Alice Miller. There’s an anthology of interesting essays that explore the concept: “Perspectives on Human Dignity: A Conversation,” ed. Jeff Malpas.
Hacks me off that the religious right quickly appropriate any term or concept used to fight them.
Take the way that in the UK the assisted dying lobby stressed dignity as something being denied dying people by religious bigotry. The Voluntary Euthanasia Society even changed its name to Dignity in Dying to avoid all the kneejerk reactions caused by religionists whose endless streams of effluent made ‘euthanasia’ an absolute boo word.
What to do when resisting religious nastiness and defining what you are against?
Maybe use another boo word to stand in for ‘religion’ (hate, ignorance…) instead of a hurray word to define your own stance?
“The fact is, you can be as right as you want about when bloody tissue acquires the rights of a human, but if 40% of the opulation disagree with your superior knowledge, their representatives get a place in the discussion.”
No they don’t. This is why I’m not a democrat. This is why I want no truck with a democracy unless it has strong safeguards for secularism and rights along with a respect for superior knowledge. (The implicit sneer is interesting. I take it you think superior knowledge is a bad thing, Chris? Do you always think that? Or only when religion is in play?) I certainly don’t agree that if 40% of the population disagree with superior knowledge of well-established medical findings, any attention should be paid to their representatives. I don’t agree that knowledge is or should be democratic or subject to majority rule.
ChrisPer: I’m not sure I understand your response. If you follow Pinker’s argument beyond just the stray paragraphs OB quoted (she provided a link, after all), you’ll find – surprise! – that there’s much more to the argument than just the (true) statement that failure to engage in this research results in unnecessary suffering and loss of life. The important part – the part I emphasized – is that this research is being blocked based on completely spurious and wholly unsupportable objections.
Blocking research that advances human welfare because the research itself would damage human welfare (or otherwise morally transgress) is reasonable and justifiable. Blocking research that advances human welfare because of unsupported accusations of ethical transgression – accusations which turn out to be no more than hand-waving mysticism and bald-faced deception – is neither reasonable nor justified. What is “crap” about that argument? I just don’t see what your point is supposed to be, and repeating it didn’t help.
Here’s the thing about the perspectives people bring to the table in policy debates. Everyone must be welcome at the table, I’ll agree. But when people come to the table with no publicly available evidence or universally shared moral beliefs or other acceptable premises that could contribute meaningfully to a reasoned argument, their contributions to the discussion should get exactly as much respect as they earn – none. People’s baseless personal convictions – no matter how fervently held – cannot be a legitimate basis for PUBLIC policy, which by definition affects everyone. I know public policy debates are never all that rational and evidence-driven in practice, but I still think rational public policy based on publicly available evidence and universally (or near-universally) agreed-upon moral principles is an ideal we should strive for rather than a pipe dream we should dismiss out of hand.
In other words, I’m not arguing that the religious conservatives’ views don’t deserve to be heard. I’m just saying that as long as their arguments aren’t worth a damn, as you say yourself, then their arguments shouldn’t shape public policy.
To wax philosophical for a moment…
John Rawls drew a distinction between the “rational” and the “reasonable” (which he defined in very specific terms) in an attempt to achieve a basis for compromise on divisive public policy issues such as this. Specifically, Rawls argued that participants in public policy debates need not be wholly rational, which he defined for this purpose as admitting only universally agreed-upon or evidentially supported premises into arguments (which is clearly too high a standard for the real world, as almost no individual lives up to it, and still fewer interest groups). He said that participants in public debate need only be reasonable, or willing to recognize that they have no right to impose their non-rational beliefs beliefs on others – where “non-rational beliefs” are simply those not supported by publicly available evidence and/or universally agreed-upon premises acceptable in rational arguments. Unfortunately for Rawls’ project, the people Rawls tries so very hard to claim can be reasonable in his sense (religious moderates, for example) often don’t actually turn out to be reasonable in practice.
(Rawls’ protegé Martha Nussbaum seems to resolve this problem by pretending it doesn’t exist: She refers only to the friendliest and most amenable examples whenever she discusses this and related problems, ignoring all unreasonable people and groups as much as possible – which irritates OB to no end and has been a topic of discussion hereabouts on more than a few occasions.)
Even if hardly anyone counts as rational in Rawls’ sense, I still think the distinction between reasonable and unreasonable people and positions is crucial. It helps clarify the difference between those who are actually coming to the table of public policy discussion with honest intent, and those whose only goal at the table is to lie, manipulate and bully the rest of the participants into forming policy based on their rationally unsupportable personal convictions.
Unfortunately, the Bush administration has – I suspect to the surprise of no one reading here – created a Council on Bioethics composed entirely of thoroughly unreasonable people. In fact, there was a lot of press on the Council back in 2004 when Leon Kass replaced the few reasonable people who had accidentally been appointed with conservatives more amenable to generating rationalizations in support of whatever conclusions the administration wants.
That’s a very useful distinction – I’ll have to keep that in mind. If people can just accept that their non-rational reasons have no purchase (and no right to purchase) on anyone else – then I’ll sit down quietly and fold my hands and be very very good.
Exactly, about Nussbaum. She makes me want to bang my head on the desk when she does that. I hate it when people do that because it persuades others that there is no problem and there is there is there is.
This was exactly the thing I objected to in one crucial part of Michael Bérubé’s excellent What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?. He agreed with me, too. He’s a good guy.
You may remember it – it was much like the Amish question. He was arguing that we can get along without total agreement (and so without foundationalism) because we can all agree on some things, one of them being ‘you are entitled to health care.’ My objection was that we can all agree on that, yes, but not on ‘your daughter is entitled to health care.’ It’s the Amish thing again, you see. We can agree on some things as long as it’s one and one and one. But when it comes to one-and-one’s-children – that’s where the crunch is. Also one-and-one’s-wife in the very many places where wives are wholly owned subsidiaries. Also sometimes one-and-one’s-subordinates. And so on.
If people can just accept that their non-rational reasons have no purchase (and no right to purchase) on anyone else – then I’ll sit down quietly and fold my hands and be very very good.
OB, I think we’ll all continue to miss out on the no-doubt-amusing spectacle of you attempting to sit quietly and be very, very good. ;-)
What Rawls missed (and Nussbaum ignores) is the inverse relationship between two factors: (1) a person or group’s tendency to adhere to rationally insupportable convictions (such as the equivalence in moral worth between embryos and actual people, or the non-equivalence in moral worth between men and women), and (2) a person or group’s ability and/or willingness to recognize any limitation whatsoever on their presumed right to force others to obey the dictates of their rationally insupportable convictions. The more strongly someone holds insupportable convictions, the less able they are to recognize or acknowledge that those convictions are insupportable, and therefore the less willing they are to accept that they have no right to force others to adhere to their convictions. In short, the more irrational they are, the less reasonable they are.
I think Rawls was correct to argue that irrational people and interest groups still deserve a voice in policy decisions insofar as they remain reasonable, but incorrect to assume that people capable of being irrational-yet-still-reasonable exist in significant numbers. At best, there are a lot of people (like Leon Kass and his theocon coterie, and creationists, and global warming denialists) who attempt to masquerade as reasonable people while simultaneously engaging in every manner of cheap emotive rhetoric and crass manipulation to influence policy decisions and/or rationalize insupportable policies already in place.
True, true, my sitting still and being good would not last long. The squirming and whimpering would start very soon.
Yeah. I do know some people who can be reasonable in that way – but they don’t exactly clog the aisles.
I have read the discussion with interest. I can’t quite understand, nor, to the extent that I can, can I agree with Chris. I think G’s point about Rawls’ distinction between reason and reasonableness is an important one. Religious people tend to think that they are being reasonable, when they’re not. They think they can take their premises for granted. They can’t. I gather that’s the case with the report that Pinker is criticising so trenchantly.
One thing that I would, however, be loathe to do, is to give up the concept of human dignity. I know it doesn’t work unless you can define it, and here’s where autonomy, informed consent, and so on, come in. But it’s interesting the way that Pinker ends his piece. Speaking about all the benefits that will no accrue to people because of the idiotically presumptuous suppression of legitimate scientific research by people who can give no reason for doing so, he says: ‘And that would be the biggest affront to human dignity of all.’
That, it seems to me, despite the title of his article, is very powerful. That’s why the religious have tried to take possession of the concept. It still has a deep resonance which, at the outset, I think, was not religious at all. I’ve heard it said that the use of the term dignity with respect to human beings derives from the Christian idea that ‘man’ is made in the image of God (whatever that might be thought to mean). That didn’t stop the church from treating most people with scant regard, until they were forced to accept the dignity of the individual by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. Of course, as well as being an emotive term, dignity implied autonomy, the fact that each individual human being was a centre of plans and projects and decisions that deserved respect (so long, at least, as that autonomy respected the autonomy of others).
Which is why one’s patience is a little more than tried when the religious think they can apply the term to a few cells in a petrie dish. Talk about emptying a concept of all meaning!
But what about licking ice-cream! How much more horribly undignified than that can you get?!
G and OB take the floor on the merits of rationality, no question.
Just wish that most other issues were resolved by rationality too.
Can people be rational but not reasonable in Rawls’s sense?
How about arguing for eugenics?
Eric MacDonald is 100% right on the power and history of the concept of human dignity, and on why this is the precise reason why religious fundamentalists love to appropriate it. And why Pinker closes his article with a reference to it. Appropriation of terms is a common enough tactic in debates. Dignity is hardly the only term to be so used. “Autonomy” itself is often appropriated by religious people who argue that Darwinism and acknowledging human connection to animals is a threat to human freedom. Giving up on words because they’ve been appropriated is a bad political/intellectual tactic–it allows your opponents to define the debate.
True, Jenavir…although sometimes particular words get so contaminated by these appropriations – they get so thoroughly redefined and re-understood – that it’s impossible to use them without being misleading.
What you said in your first comment (above) is powerful, and important. And that understanding of dignity is why (I think) dignity was so important in the UDHR – why it introduced the UDHR. In the aftermath of millions upon millions of experiences of destroyed dignity, it seemed essential to defend it.
But then when it gets taken over to glorify cells at the expense of actual persons…I despair of recovering it.
Actually I think that once your opponents have succeeded in appropriating a word, it’s very hard if not impossible to go on using the word without letting them define the debate.
Ophelia, I think we can get it back. When you start applying it to cells in a petrie dish, it’s really a reductio of this kind of religious use. Point it out again and again, and they’ll have to redefine their terms, and when they do, they’ll have lost ground.
I don’t like religions getting away with demeaning language. They’ve almost done the same thing with the word ‘morality’, you know.
Religions are greedy. As Hector Avalos points out in his book “Fighting Words”, they create scarce resources just by the way they use language. They’ve laid claim to the following words too: ‘transcendence’, ‘awe’, ‘gratitude’, ‘spirituality’. It’s hard to use them without religious connotations, some of them so strong they’re hard for anyone but the religious to use. Religions are like armies, and the gobble up conceptual territory as fast as they can. That’s why I think the end of Pinker’s article is just right. It takes back conceptual territory. The religious don’t really have any troops there, you know.
Eric, I do know.
Well I’m all in favour of doing everything we can to take the words back. That’s why I have this habit of writing dictionaries! But all the same, until success is clear, I remain very wary of certain words.
Not a democrat, OB? What, then?
Or is this the USA-ian definition that I seem to encounter so often on the interweb?
DFG, well the following sentence explained, I thought – I’m a liberal democrat or a constitutional democrat.
OB, Ah yes. I get my back up when I see phrases like that, that’s all. Probably due to the usual following sentence found on the internetstockings: “America is a republic…” Oh, the frustration.
Tingey,
The religious tossers are hardly going to get involved in Scientific debate are they…ummm.
OB: that’s quite true about words being hard to re-appropriate, though I don’t think “dignity” (or “morality,” for that matter) is there yet since it’s so often used in genuinely secular contexts like the UDHR. But while words might be difficult to re-appropriate, it’s never impossible. All it takes is the effort of repeatedly explaining what you mean by this word, and why it’s different from what others mean by it. Which, admittedly, can be a huge pain.
I don’t think anyone is a pure democrat, though plenty of people use rhetoric that implies they are.
Jenavir, I’d love to think you’re right that all it takes is the effort of repeatedly explaining, but alas I don’t think you are, simply because with all the effort in the world it’s still not possible to reach everyone; it’s mostly not possible to reach more than two or three people at a time. If a few people are making the effort to re-appropriate words while vast numbers of other people are going right on using them the appropriated way – then it’s impossible to re-appropriate them. I don’t see any reason to think the party that wants to re-appropriate a word will naturally win if it just tries hard enough.
I think a lot of people are pure democrats in the sense of thinking majority will is sacrosanct and should always prevail. A lot of people, at least in the US, think that’s what democracy means, and that it’s a good thing.
Oh, I don’t think the re-appropriators will naturally win. I think they have a significant chance of winning if the words they try to re-appropriate had some sort of valuable history or resonance before they were appropriated. But you’re right, it’s far from inevitable.
I bet the people who think that’s what democracy means would re-think it in a hurry if you pointed out the consequences to them personally of (for instance) getting rid of constitutional limits on what the majority can do to the minority. At least, I hope so!
Yes, often people who think that’s what democracy means do change their minds if one points out the consequences to them – but lots and lots of people apparently never have the consequences pointed out to them! It really is a quite pervasive misunderstanding, alas.
G. First rate responce to Crisper although what do you mean by this? As to your other example: Yes, the animal rights extremists generally rely just as much on pure emotional appeal and empty rhetoric and outright deception as any theocon one could name.
G. First rate responce to Crisper although what do you mean by this? As to your other example: Yes, the animal rights extremists generally rely just as much on pure emotional appeal and empty rhetoric and outright deception as any theocon one could name.
One of the differences though, Richard, is that the likes of PETA make no bones about their hyperbole. They freely admit to the use of that publicity tactic.
I was just wondering how G.would define extremeist with regard to animal rights? would he for instance consider P.E.T.A extreme?
Good question, Richard. Though it depends where you are placing the centre. Here is P Singer, here is PETA, here is the RSPCA. Here is a pet-shop owner. Here is an chicken farmer. Here is you.
Arrange in order
I would be the wrong person to ask that of DFG I just spent a fourtune on a humane rat repelent because I did not want to poisen the rat that moved in under my house,to my mind animals dont have voices so if people b.s on their behalf I am fine with it.
That’s an honest and straightforward response, Richard. Nice one.
Thanks