With Good Reason Is 'Dignity' a Stupid Concept?

May 27, 2008

Is 'Dignity' a Stupid Concept?

Steven Pinker on Dignity and the President's Council on Bioethics

 

In an article published in the May 28th edition of The New Republic, Dr. Steven Pinker (whose views on the emerging field of neuromorality I've had occasion to consider in previous columns), questions whether the notion of 'human dignity' is really useful at all. To be sure, Pinker finds the notion not only unhelpful, but "stupid."  He expresses this view in the context of a generally acerbic critique which at times becomes a rant against a recently released volume of commissioned essays entitled Human Dignity and Bioethics, published by the President's Council on Bioethics.

 

In his TNR piece, Pinker largely reproduces the comments he made at the March 7th meeting of the Council as an invited participant of a three-member panel offering a response to the release of Human Dignity.  His assessment of the volume at the time--highly critical--can be summarized with this portion of his remarks:

 

I see the current volume as designed to put dignity on a firmer conceptual basis and therefore provide the grounds for regulating or banning... disquieting [biomedical] practices [such as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, somatic cell nuclear transfer, surrogacy, in vitro fertilization and other reproductive technologies, and cloning].  This, I believe, is the ultimate goal of the President's Council, and it's why I think there was a thumb on the scale in choosing the authorship of the reports.  [T]he volume [fails to provide] a sound basis for dignity, and indeed, almost every essay notes that the concept remains ambiguous, slippery, and vague.

 

To these critiques both of the Council volume and of the concept of 'human dignity' itself, Pinker adds a needless and mean-spirited diatribe against Dr. Leon Kass, the first chairman of the Council.  He also adds an amusing take on what he believes is a not-so-subtle plot by Catholic-minded 'theocons' to take control of the President's Council on Bioethics--a nefarious conspiracy which Pinker believes to have uncovered after carefully connecting the dots.  Writes Pinker:

 

The Catholic Church, with its long tradition of scholarship and its rock-solid moral precepts, became the natural home for this [the Theocon] movement, and the journal First Things, under the leadership of Father Richard John Neuhaus, its mouthpiece. Catholicism now provides the intellectual muscle behind a movement that embraces socially conservative Jewish and Protestant intellectuals as well. When Neuhaus met with Bush in 1998 as he was planning his run for the presidency, they immediately hit it off. Three of the original Council members (including Kass) are board members of First Things, and Neuhaus himself contributed an essay to the Dignity volume. In addition, five other members have contributed articles to First Things over the years.

 

So there you have it:  the 'vast right wing conspiracy' meets in the basement of the Manhattan offices of First Things, the journal which the conspirators use as their playbook. This is all high praise for our friend Fr. Neuhaus.  It is also hysteria on the part of Steven Pinker.

 

But such is the unfortunate tone of Pinker's piece:  hysteria, ranting, anger.  How about some calm-headed, and perhaps justifiable and constructive critique for this volume?  Pinker is certainly intelligent and capable of expressing himself without the bitterness and hype, but this is seldom what you get from Pinker.

 

Buried, then, under some of the most acerbic hype and over-the-top gratuitous affirmations that you will have read in quite some time, there are actually one or two thoughtful critiques of 'theocon bioethics.' Since I probably fit the bill of 'theocon bioethicist' as well as anyone else, allow me to offer some response, point per point, to Dr. Pinker.

 

Pinker: "The sickness in theocon bioethics goes beyond imposing a Catholic agenda on a secular democracy and using "dignity" to condemn anything that gives someone the creeps. Ever since the cloning of Dolly the sheep a decade ago, the panic sown by conservative bioethicists, amplified by a sensationalist press, has turned the public discussion of bioethics into a miasma of scientific illiteracy. Brave New World, a work of fiction, is treated as inerrant prophesy. Cloning is confused with resurrecting the dead or mass-producing babies. Longevity becomes "immortality," improvement becomes "perfection," the screening for disease genes becomes "designer babies" or even "reshaping the species."

 

Berg:  The last time I checked, we (those of us driving the "Catholic agenda") have been fighting and scraping to get a seat at the table of mainstream biomedicine in order to have so much as a token voice on substantive bioethical issues. My being named to the Empire State Stem Cell Board was nothing short of a miracle in a field resolutely dominated by mainstream secular ethical perspectives. Call it the "Catholic agenda" if you want; I call it bioethics from within the natural law perspective. That such a perspective has such a large representation on the President's Council is a rather amazing exception to the normal practice of boxing out those of us who question the new secular biomedical orthodoxy.

 

As to the remaining elements of hyperbole in this paragraph:  I will grant that conservative bioethicists make one too many references to Aldous Huxley's classic sci-fi novel. But Pinker could hardly disagree that the field of developmental biology is opening up unprecedented possibilities in biomedicine that will have a lasting and irreversible impact for better or for worse on the entire species. Cloning, if it ever works with human cells, can and likely will be used to "mass-produce" human embryos (embryonic "babies") for research purposes. As to those pursuing a grasp of the genes that control aging, well, why stop at longevity? 'Perfection' is, to my knowledge, the goal generally sought in improving things, including the human organism--but I personally know of no conservative bioethicist (certainly there are some) who opposes all genetic enhancement in principle. Most of us are just suggesting that we slow down on the question of genetic enhancement and think this through a little more carefully. Pinker apparently has a problem with that. As to 'designer babies', well Steve, when you sex-select an embryo, when you abort a fetus because you discover it has a high propensity for developing colon cancer some day, or your medical team works to design a 'savior sibling' from whom they can eventually extract bone marrow to do a transplant for his or her ailing brother Johnny--in the minds of most sane individuals, that's called designing babies, to not say eugenics.

(Column continues below)

 

Pinker [Finally making a plausible point]: "The reality is that biomedical research is a Sisyphean struggle to eke small increments in health from a staggeringly complex, entropy-beset human body. It is not, and probably never will be, a runaway train."

 

Berg: Point well taken. Of course, Pinker--who later in the article accuses conservative bioethicists of exuding "overweening hubris" and of "soothsaying" the biomedical future--can no more look into a crystal ball than anyone else. And in the realm of developmental biology, it doesn't have to be a runaway train for grave and irreparable harm to be done to humanity.

 

Pinker: "Worst of all, 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."

 

Berg: O, please! Not again. Grabbing the moral high ground with the "millions-of-people-who-could-be-cured-are-going-to-die-needlessly-because-you-are-obstructing-scientific-progress-with-your-conservative-(Catholic)-agenda" argument. Or better said, non-argument, and patent absurdity. Pinker just finished observing that "biomedical research is a Sisyphean struggle to eke small increments in health from a staggeringly complex" human body.  And perhaps Pinker is unaware that the mega-buck, $6 billion dollar California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (the state's private funding agency for stem cell research, now--I might add--wholly beyond the grasp of us Catholic obstructionist conspirators) has proposed in its ten-year strategic plan, as a whopping, to-the-rescue-of-dying-humanity-goal, "to show [after 10 years] evidence that cell replacement therapy using derivatives of human embryonic stem cells is effective for at least one disease." 

 

One disease. 

 

What then of the "millions of people with degenerative diseases and failing organs [who] would needlessly suffer and die?"  Or, is it rather, that stem cell research, even if entirely untethered from the least ethical concerns, is likely to yield precious little for these suffering people in the short term?  Am I to be accused of "callousness" for stating the obvious, something which most honest stem cell researchers themselves appear to recognize?

 

So, Steve, if you really want us to take you seriously, please set aside the hyperbole, nastiness, and kvetching, and get down to the business of calm and reasonable consideration of how we as members of a liberal democracy can best allow this science to go forward in a way that respects "personal autonomy" and "respect for the person" - concepts which aptly describe something that you and I and many of us could agree on as dimensions of human dignity.