Part I The Source and Meaning of Human Dignity in Worldview Context 6244-013-P1-003.indd 47 9/4/2012 6:42:27 PM 6244-013-P1-003.indd 48 9/4/2012 6:42:27 PM 3 A Catholic Perspective on Human Dignity Christopher Tollefsen Reference to “human dignity” and “the dignity of the human person” occurs repeatedly in recent Catholic papal and magisterial teaching, beginning roughly with the encyclical Rerum novarum of Leo XIII, continuing in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, and eventually coming to dominate the writings of Pope John Paul II. As a result of that increased emphasis, concern for the idea of human dignity has also come to characterize the scholarly work by Catholics of recent decades that has been devoted to articulating and arguing for that teaching (see, e.g., Gormally 2004; Hittinger 2006; Sulmasy 2007, 2008; Neuhaus 2008; Lee and George 2008). Human dignity, and the overshadowing of that dignity in modernity, are considered the key concepts for an adequate philosophical anthropology, for working out acceptable solutions to contemporary bioethical dilemmas, and, more broadly, for understanding the condition, and even crisis, of man in the contemporary world. It would appear, in fact, that contemporary Catholic social and moral teaching, and even its ecclesiology, is grounded, ultimately, in this very idea. It is perhaps inevitable that a concept such as human dignity, given, as it is, so much prominence in recent Catholic thought, should be subject to a backlash, both by secular thinkers, dubious of Catholic positions on a host of controversial issues, and even by some Catholics, suspicious of the uses or abuses of the concept within their own tradition. This chapter will investigate the core ideas of the concept of human dignity in Catholic thought and defend that idea against three strands of criticism. The first two are made by secular thinkers, including, most prominently, bioethicists. The first of these secular complaints is that the idea of dignity is, essentially, a species-ist notion, a way of illicitly giving preference to beings like us over nonhuman animals and of attributing excellence that is manifestly not present to beings of diminished or undeveloped cognitive capacity. The second secular criticism is that the notion of dignity is too vague, and that its vagueness serves as cover for the intellectual deficiencies of the positions it is meant to support. Dignity, on this view, serves merely as a rhetorical device by which conservative Christians, especially Catholics, can help themselves to conclusions to which they are already committed. 6244-013-P1-003.indd 49 9/4/2012 6:42:27 PM 50 Christopher Tollefsen A third strand of criticism comes from within Catholicism itself and holds that the modern Catholic idea of dignity is simply mistaken. Robert Kraynak in particular has recently argued that the Catholic “personalism” of John Paul II, Jacques Maritain, John Finnis, and others has been unacceptably Kantian in its outlook, with disastrous consequences, in particular, an increasingly individualistic and subjectivist assertion of rights. In my dialectical exchange with these three types of criticism, I will articulate a version of the Catholic view on human dignity that does indeed give preference to species membership, but not, I will argue, unreasonably. In consequence, all human beings, even those of diminished or undeveloped cognitive ability, are privileged morally over every subhuman animal, yet are fundamentally equal with one another. I will argue further that, while the idea of dignity can, and sometimes does, serve only as rhetorical cover where arguments are missing, it need not, and that Catholic thought on dignity, especially the thought of Pope John Paul II, is attuned to precisely that which must be articulated in order for the idea of dignity to give birth to substantive moral norms. In this essay, I concentrate especially on norms governing the field of bioethics and, in particular, norms concerning the socalled human life issues such as abortion and euthanasia, norms concerning reproductive technologies, and norms grounding the right to health care. Finally, I will argue that the evaluative foundations and conclusions in which dignity is implicated are indeed best described as “personalists” describe them; and that while they generate robust rights claims, those claims are neither subjectivist nor individualist; the resulting account, I argue, both corrects and complements contemporary liberalism. THE DIGNITY OF THE HUMAN PERSON I shall begin with the thought of Pope John Paul II, in his Encyclical Evangelium vitae (Pope John Paul II 1995), for there the pope appears to be engaged in a summation of Catholic thought on the subject of human dignity precisely in order to combat the overshadowing of that dignity in modernity, and especially in the medical context. Abortion, euthanasia, and even capital punishment are described as threats to human dignity, and the foundational nature of that dignity for respectful treatment of the human person is reiterated often. John Paul identifies, in Evangelium vitae, three aspects to the dignity of the human person (Pope John Paul II 1995: nos. 34–38). First, the human person has dignity because of his source: he is made by God, and entirely gratuitously. Second, because of his nature: he is made in God’s image. And finally, man has dignity because he is made for God, a destination the nature of which is transformed in Christ, by whom we are called to share in God’s life, as his adopted sons and daughters. In what follows, I examine each of these key ideas, the understanding of each of which penetrates the understanding 6244-013-P1-003.indd 50 9/4/2012 6:42:27 PM A Catholic Perspective on Human Dignity 51 of the others. These ideas summarize the pope’s thought, and magisterial teaching more generally, on the core constitutive dignity of the human person, a dignity that is inalienable, and not lost even by actions which are not consonant with that dignity: “Not even a murderer loses his personal dignity, and God himself pledges to guarantee this” (Pope John Paul II 1995: no. 9). Made by God as a Gift God is the author of all creation, not only of man. How, then, can man’s creation be special? Gaudium et Spes, from the Second Vatican Council, gives us the answer, in describing man as “the only creature on earth that God has willed for itself” (Second Vatican Council 1965b: no. 20). This raises a natural question: what is it about man that makes it possible for his existence to be willed for itself? The answer to this can only emerge gradually through discussion of dignity in its three aspects, but it is clear from Genesis, and has been held true throughout the Catholic tradition, that God willed the existence of the rest of earthly creation for the sake of man. Gaudium et Spes thus articulates the following view: all earthly creation exists for the sake of man, but man exists for his own sake; and in this is partly to be found man’s dignity. Moreover, in that willing of man’s existence for his own sake, God can rightly be said to have willed man’s existence, and, of all earthly creation, only that existence, as a gift. God did not need to create man, so man serves no instrumental purpose, unlike the rest of creation, which is created only for the good of man himself. Man’s creation thus is entirely gratuitous. This, too, reflects an aspect of human dignity. But the glory of both this willingas-gift and the willing of man for his own sake (two interpenetrated notions) are magnified by the fact that the source of the creation is God himself. God who is all good and all powerful is nevertheless capable of creation for the sake of the good of what is created, and the goodness of the creation takes its value, its dignity, from its source as well as from the way in which the source has willed. Made in God’s Image Of all the reasons commonly proffered as explaining man’s dignity, the most commonly mentioned is the second—that man is made in the image of God. This claim, I will argue, has both descriptive and normative components; it can only be fully understood insofar as it is recognized to point ahead of man’s given nature to the nature he should take on in action, a nature that is other regarding and eventually to be completed in Christ. The descriptive component is often, and accurately, understood in the following way: man is made in the image of God precisely because his existence is that of a person. Man, that is, is possessed of reason and will and is capable of rational thought and free choice (for an articulation and defense of this view, see Lee and George 2008). We see this dual emphasis in the documents 6244-013-P1-003.indd 51 9/4/2012 6:42:27 PM 52 Christopher Tollefsen of the Second Vatican Council: in Dignitatis Humanae, the council writes that our “dignity as persons” is our existence as “beings endowed with reason and free will and therefore privileged to bear personal responsibility” (Second Vatican Council 1965a: no. 2). John Paul similarly summarizes: “The biblical author [in the book of Sirach] sees as part of this image . . . those spiritual faculties which are distinctively human, such as reason, discernment between good and evil, and free will” (Pope John Paul II 1995: no. 34). Already, in these descriptions, we see anticipation of the way in which the image of God is normative, for reason and free will, in man, are necessary precisely so that we may bear that privilege of “personal responsibility.” This responsibility was identified centuries before by Saint Thomas Aquinas as our participation in God’s eternal law; unlike the rest of earthly creation, which follows God’s law blindly, because made to do so by God, human beings are given a share in divine reason, and the faculty of free choice, precisely so that they may guide and constitute themselves as the persons they are to be in accordance with God’s plan (Aquinas 1920: I–II, Prologue). It is in this active shaping of their own lives in accordance with reason that human beings are like—in the image of—the divine. But the orientation of this power must be identified; that is, what is the substantive content of the deliverances of reason? This question concerns the content of the natural law, a question to which I will turn later in this chapter. The descriptive content further shades into the evaluative in magisterial and papal reflections on human dignity as those are carried out in light of the first Genesis account. In that account, man is made in God’s image as male and female, and this was a subject of intense interest for John Paul II in his reflections on marriage. In their complementary maleness and femaleness, spouses are uniquely enabled to extend what the Second Vatican Council teaches is perhaps the most important way that human beings image God—namely that they are capacitated, by their personhood, and enjoined, by reason and the divine will, to love. Marital love is a profound imaging of the divine precisely because by it spouses realize a unity similar to that of the unity of the divine persons; they are one flesh, as the divine persons are one God. And they mirror the fruitfulness of the divine love, which goes out from the father to the son, and then from the two in the procession of the Holy Spirit, in the embodying of their love in another, viz., a child. Martial union and fruitfulness are so much like the triune divine life that it is not out of place to speak of the “dignity of marriage,” as we speak also of the dignity of the person.1 We reach here as well a starting point for the fully normative task of persons insofar as they are made in the image of God, which Gaudium et Spes puts as follows: God did not create man as a solitary, for from the beginning “male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27). Their companionship produces the primary form of interpersonal communion. For by his innermost 6244-013-P1-003.indd 52 9/4/2012 6:42:27 PM A Catholic Perspective on Human Dignity 53 nature man is a social being, and unless he relates himself to others he can neither live nor develop his potential.” (Second Vatican Council 1965b: no. 12) We find this thought more strikingly articulated as the conclusion of a point already noted: “man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself” (Second Vatican Council 1965b: no. 24). We see here two things. First, the earlier point about one aspect of man’s dignity being found in his source—that is, God’s gratuitous creation—here is joined to the second point about man’s dignity as being made in the image of God. For God, in creating a being for its own sake, creates that being as able to love—that, we here find articulated, is what it means to be a being capable of existing for its own sake. And it is thus only in loving that man realizes, or fulfills, the nature by which he has dignity. Thus, man’s dignity presents him with a task (Beabout 2004; I will return to this theme later), and we could say that his constitutive dignity—the dignity he has in virtue of what he is—thus sets on man a requirement to strive for existential dignity (Gormally 2004), the dignity of excellence as a being capable of love and self-gift. A final point should be made about the dignity of man as image of God, to which I will return later as well. It is tempting to interpret the language of “image of God” as it bears on man’s personhood in a purely spiritual way. That is, one might think that it is only as thinking and willing that man is a person in such a way that the body is other than that person. This form of dualism is resisted by the Catholic tradition, as the following passage from Gaudium et Spes makes clear: Though made of body and soul, man is one. Through his bodily composition he gathers to himself the elements of the material world; thus they reach their crown through him, and through him raise their voice in free praise of the Creator. For this reason man is not allowed to despise his bodily life; rather he is obliged to regard his body as good and honorable . . . the very dignity of man postulates that man glorify God in his body. (Second Vatican Council 1965b: no. 14) Made for God Man, as created in the image of God, is also created “capable of knowing and loving his Creator” (Second Vatican Council 1965b: no. 12). We can discern three levels of this knowing and loving, each of which manifests the dignity of man. First, even apart from revelation, there are adequate reasons to conclude that a personal and creative God exists who is responsible for not only man 6244-013-P1-003.indd 53 9/4/2012 6:42:27 PM 54 Christopher Tollefsen but man’s nature, including the reason which makes possible man’s orientation toward his own fulfillment. Thus, a relationship of cooperation is, it may be inferred, offered by God to man: to do as reason requires is to cooperate with God in a project, the end of which is that fulfillment available to man on earth. Thus, a form of friendship with God is offered to man and may be said to be his destiny and, thereby, his dignity. That friendship, moreover, is deeply personal, for God calls each human person to a particular life; this personal call, man’s vocation, has been especially emphasized by recent magisterial and papal documents and is likewise central to man’s dignity. Second, that offer of friendship is extended, in revelation, to a promise of the Kingdom: men are offered the possibility of everlasting life in a communion with other saints, with angels, and with the persons of the Trinity. This eternal life is, moreover, a bodily life, and the Second Vatican Council alluded to this, in the passage quoted above, in explaining the dignity of man’s bodily life. Third, the offer is extended once more, in baptism, through which we are not simply cleansed of sin and made newly worthy of eternal life but by which also we enter into the divine life of the son and thus become adopted sons and daughters of the father. We enter, that is, into the divine life of the Trinity itself, and this divination finds its completion in the beatific vision, an immediate knowing of God in his divinity for which no created intellect is adequate. This threefold destination—friendship with God, eternal life in the Kingdom, and divine life in the Trinity—can all be summarized by speaking of man as “made for” God, although each in different ways. And this being made for God is the third of the aspects of man’s dignity identified by John Paul II. Before turning, in the next section, to the first of the three criticisms of the idea of human dignity, it is worth noting that these three aspects of human dignity—being made by God, in His image, and for God—though presented by John Paul II, other popes, and the Magisterium within the rich framework of Catholic teaching, nevertheless are all witnessed to by natural reason as well as specifically Catholic teaching. That the existence of all contingently existing beings can find an adequate explanation only in the existence of a non-contingently existing being that nevertheless freely creates is a truth available to philosophy and is recognized unreflectively, if inadequately, by almost every culture in history. That man’s quest for fulfillment requires the active cooperation of that creative being is similarly available to natural reason (Grisez 2008). And, finally, the special nature of man, particularly insofar as he is a reasoning and choosing being, has been recognized throughout intellectual and social history even by those, such as Plato, with no access to revelation. This is not to say that revelation and faith add nothing; nor is it to say that the truth is these matters is easily or always obtained. But the idea of human dignity that supervenes on the convergence of these three truths about man is far from sectarian or inaccessible to human reason. 6244-013-P1-003.indd 54 9/4/2012 6:42:27 PM A Catholic Perspective on Human Dignity 55 THE CHALLENGE OF MORAL INDIVIDUALISM Among the most striking aspects of the Catholic view of human dignity is its universalism and its egalitarianism. That is, first, all human beings are held to possess human dignity, regardless of their age, stage of development, cognitive capacity, or any other accidental property. What is sufficient for possessing this dignity is simply membership in the species Homo sapiens. Thus, if, as seems scientifically demonstrable, human embryos are individuals in that species, then human embryos possess human dignity. Similarly, if patients in a persistent or permanent vegetative state remain human beings, then such patients also possess human dignity. Finally, even murderers, as we have seen, because they remain individuals of the species, do not lose their human dignity (recognition of this truth as developed through time in the Church; Saint Thomas Aquinas, for example, did not hold this view). If there is an overriding theme of John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium vitae, it is, in fact, the “dignity of every human being” (Pope John Paul II 1995: no. 25). The equality of dignity in all persons is likewise well attested. Gaudium et Spes, for example, notes that Since all men possess a rational soul and are created in God’s likeness, since they have the same nature and origin, have been redeemed by Christ and enjoy the same divine calling and destiny, the basic equality of all must receive increasingly greater recognition. (Second Vatican Council 1965b: no. 29) This universal and equal nature of dignity has concrete practical implications, among which is the principle forbidding the instrumentalization or subordination of the life of one human being to that of another. The weak, the young, the old, the poor, the vulnerable—since all are of fundamentally equal worth, it is a violation of dignity to sacrifice one for another; yet, because members of the rest of animal creation do not possess this fundamental form of dignity, and are, in fact, made for man and under his dominion, it is licit to act toward animals in ways that would never be permissible with respect to human beings: raising them for meat, using them in medical experiments to their detriment, deliberately sacrificing their lives for the sake of human well-being. Further, for reasons that have been touched upon, and that will be addressed at greater length in the next section, the dignity of the human person requires respect for the bodily life of all persons, a respect held to be incompatible with direct killing. Thus, even killing that is done “for the good of the patient,” as euthanasia is often claimed to be, is impermissible on the Catholic view. John Paul’s words on this are, in fact, especially striking: Therefore, by the authority which Christ conferred upon Peter and his Successors, and in communion with the Bishops of the Catholic Church, 6244-013-P1-003.indd 55 9/4/2012 6:42:27 PM 56 Christopher Tollefsen I confirm that the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral. (Pope John Paul II 1995: no. 57) These claims put the Catholic Church at odds with much of contemporary bioethics, most practitioners of whom are wedded to a view that James Rachels has called “moral individualism”—the view that “The basic idea is that how an individual may be treated is determined, not by considering his group membership, but by considering his own particular moral characteristics” (Rachels 1990: 173; quoted in McMahan 2002: 354). Moral individualism has recently been defended by the philosopher Jeff McMahan, who, not coincidentally, takes as a spokesman for the view he is criticizing the Catholic legal philosopher John Finnis (Finnis 1995). McMahan makes two criticisms—one moral, one metaphysical—which I can only briefly address here; a full response must await another occasion. McMahan’s moral criticism is based on an analogy. Suppose that God creates someone without original sin; she is innocent in a moral sense. Ought God to send her to Hell because she belongs “to a kind of being characterized by” original sin. . . ? . . . I think that most people would think that a just God would determine her treatment by reference to whether she is actually sinful rather than by reference to the nature of typical members of her kind. And if God would act this way, presumably we should as well. (McMahan 2002: 358–59) Thus, individuals ought to be treated based on their own particular moral characteristics. McMahan’s analogy founders, however, as can be seen by the following two-step argument. The first step has to do with McMahan’s understanding of nature and its relation to sin and punishment. On most accounts of sin, original or otherwise, sin and its effects are not essential properties of a being. That is, although we talk of fallen nature as a result of human sin, we do not think that human beings underwent a substantial change as a result of original sin—we do not think they underwent, that is, a change of nature. Yet we do think that punishment is deserved as a result of sin. So the treatment of sinful man as deserving of punishment is not based on a judgment of human nature but a judgment concerning nonessential properties, specifically guilt and culpability; if those properties change, then the judgment regarding desert may change. Yet such a change would not impugn the possibility of some (nonpunitive) form of treatment that is justified by nature, and which does not change on the basis of change in nonessential properties. This, then, is the second step of the argument. Are there forms of treatment that we think are justified not on the basis of particular and “actual” properties but rather on the basis of nature? This way of asking the question is itself somewhat flawed, for a nature is a particular and actual property of a being that has it. But the sense of the question is clear: are there 6244-013-P1-003.indd 56 9/4/2012 6:42:27 PM A Catholic Perspective on Human Dignity 57 forms of treatment that we believe should be justified because of the kind of being something is, rather than anything the being has done, or achieved? The answer appears to be affirmative. Unlike punishment, which generally responds to actual guilt, our affirmation of a being’s possessing fundamental, inalienable, and absolute human rights seems predicated more properly on the nature of the being than on any nonessential properties, contingencies, or achievements. So the Catholic teaching that dignity, which is recognized as the ground for absolute and inalienable rights, pertains to a being’s species membership seems justified. McMahan’s second criticism goes to this very claim, however, for he does not see how all members of the species, even infants and the radically cognitively disabled, could have the sort of nature that possesses dignity unless that nature possessed a soul; and this notion McMahan, in turn, professes to find unsatisfactory. He thus finds no grounds on which to say that all human beings possess dignity. As will be apparent from a previous quotation, from Gaudium et Spes, the Catholic Church does teach that humans are complex beings constituted by both body and soul, though these two components are unified so as to form one being. Soul is considered by most Catholic thinkers to be the animating and organizing principle of a living body and, in the case of a rational animal, the principle that makes possible the spiritual acts of which human beings are capable. This conception is distinctly influenced by Aristotle’s hylomorphism, and while Catholics, following Aquinas, assert that the immaterial soul is subsistent—that is, capable of an independent existence—they deny that it is a substance, a complete being with a nature; only the body-soul composite it that. But it is important to note that Catholic belief in the soul is a consequence of their recognition of the presence of the same properties that are thought to justify human dignity. That is, the properties that ground dignity are judged to be impossible in a being that was not itself possessed of a nonmaterial principle, which, by making a material being to be more and other than merely a material being, could be considered the actualizing principle of that being (cf. Brugger 2008, 2010; Lee and George 2009). So the Catholic view is that possession of a certain nature—a rational nature—is a sufficient condition both for an immaterial soul and for possession of dignity. These claims might thus be put in the form of two conditionals: 1. If all human beings possess a rational nature, then all human beings have souls. 2. If all human beings possess a rational nature, then all human beings have dignity. And Catholics also assert the antecedent to both conditionals: 3. All human beings possess a rational nature. 6244-013-P1-003.indd 57 9/4/2012 6:42:27 PM 58 Christopher Tollefsen In consequence, one might deny the first conditional without that denial amounting to an argument either against the second conditional or against the assertion of the antecedent to both conditionals. McMahan acknowledges that Catholics assert the first conditional. He does not find it convincing, however, for he believes that there is “no reason to suppose that self-consciousness and rationality require a non-physical explanation if the simple consciousness of animals can be accounted for in wholly physical terms” (McMahan 2002: 11). This is not much of an argument against the first conditional, since materialist programs are, at best, far from capable of making good on their promises of complete naturalistic explanations, and because the view described here denies that human capacities are the same as the capacities of other nonhuman animals. And it is no argument at all against the second conditional. In fact, McMahan spends much of his time arguing much more directly against the antecedent of the two conditionals, for he does not think that cognitively undeveloped, damaged, or retarded human beings do possess the properties that are sufficient for the possession of dignity, viz., a rational nature. And McMahan further thinks that that those who do assert the antecedent must be committed to a Cartesian concept of the soul, as an independent rational agent, rather than an Aristotelian hylomorphic conception of the soul as the organizing principle of an organic body, for, according to McMahan, the hylomorphic soul “determines how the body is organized, not how it might later be organized” (McMahan 2002: 13). I think that here McMahan is mistaken; the Aristotelian concept of a soul, utilized by many Catholic thinkers in understanding the relationship between soul and body, is that the soul is a principle not just of present organization, in the sense of structure, but of a thing’s nature. And a nature really is understood not by focusing on properties that a being happens to have at a particular time slice but at the properties that things of that sort develop, through their own initiative, through time. This is why the debate about soul really comes back, as the earlier discussion of hell and original sin did, to a question about human nature. The Catholic view, to reiterate, is that it is in the nature of a human being—any human being—to develop itself, unless hindered by disease, environment, external threat, or other deficiency, to the point of being able to exercise its rational capacities, and that this nature is possessed even by human beings who have not yet, will not in fact, or are no longer capable of exercising those rational capacities. The key thought is this: cognitively undeveloped, damaged, or retarded human beings are themselves still beings of the same kind as those who most fully manifest the activities characteristic of beings with a rational nature. They, too, are thus to be considered beings with a rational nature. And, in accordance with the first and second conditionals above, they, too, are held to be animated by an immaterial soul and to possess human dignity. To conclude this part of the discussion, then: while it is true that the Catholic account of human dignity is more than friendly to—and, indeed, in 6244-013-P1-003.indd 58 9/4/2012 6:42:27 PM A Catholic Perspective on Human Dignity 59 some sense requires—an account of a soul, its deeper claim is that all human beings possess a common nature—a rational nature. The necessity of “soul” is motivated by a further, defensible, rejection of the sort of naturalism that would deny the irreducibility of the spiritual capacities of human beings to material causation. The deeper claim about a common rational nature is contested, but the claim is not intrinsically unreasonable; nor, in the eyes of Catholic thinkers, has it been shown false. The Catholic account thus stands as a genuine and reasonable opponent of the moral individualist account which denies that all humans have a nature of the same kind and, thus, denies any role for the notion of human dignity. THE “STUPIDITY” OF DIGNITY A second recent challenge to the importance of the notion of human dignity, made with particular attention to its Catholic supporters, has been put forth by Ruth Macklin, John Harris, and, perhaps most provocatively, Stephen Pinker. Pinker puts the objection like this: “The problem is that ‘dignity’ is a squishy, subjective notion, hardly up to the heavyweight moral demands assigned to it” (Pinker 2008). And Pinker cites Macklin’s claim that bioethics can get by without the notion, by relying exclusively on the concept of autonomy and the accompanying principle of informed consent (Macklin 2003). Harris, too, criticizes the appeal to human dignity as “comprehensively vague,” and does his best both to show that its most adequate gloss, the Kantian principle that human beings should never be treated as a means only, but also always as an end, has counterintuitive—and, indeed, ridiculous—conclusions, such as that blood transfusions should be outlawed (Harris 2005). Pinker identifies three features of dignity that reveal why it is doomed to fail as a core moral concept: dignity is relative, fungible, and occasionally harmful. That is, different acts, classes of persons, and types of appearance are considered dignified or not in different social settings, cultures, or time periods; hence, the relativity of dignity. Further, we make trade-offs of our personal dignity, in deciding, for example, to strip for a medical exam or remain at attention during an airport screening; hence, its fungibility. And finally, when we (or, more likely, our rulers) “stand on” our dignity, to the detriment of those who are punished for their offenses against our dignity, we reveal dignity’s positively harmful character. As Pinker says, “Totalitarianism is often the imposition of a leader’s conception of dignity on a population” (Pinker 2008). No doubt, such points are well taken; yet they have little, if anything, to do with the concept of dignity articulated in this essay. Still, this failure to engage with the “Catholic” conception, allegedly one of the very conceptions Pinker was concerned with in his essay, does illustrate one of two problems with dignity talk that the “stupidity and vacuity” charges really 6244-013-P1-003.indd 59 9/4/2012 6:42:27 PM 60 Christopher Tollefsen do illustrate. This is that dignity, like many other concepts, has a variety of different kinds of applications and usages, many of which are connected by way of the relationship of paradigm to analogous cases, others of which are connected by a relationship similar to Wittgenstein’s “family resemblances.” And when we move from one to another of these usages, various claims true with one usage cease to be so with another. Confusion and specious argumentation are the result if these shifts are not taken into consideration. Thus, in this essay, I have concentrated, as the Catholic Church does, on the core of the nature of dignity as an intrinsic property possessed by human beings as possessed of the capacities for reason and free choice. Different authors, in attempts to indicate that this is the type of dignity to which they refer, modify the word in different ways: connatural dignity (Gormally 2004); intrinsic dignity (Sulmasy 2007); personal dignity (Lee and George 2008); or, as here, constitutive dignity. On the account shared by all these (Catholic) authors, it is clear that dignity cannot be lost except by virtue of a human being’s ceasing to exist, as at death. Yet the notion is easily extended, for example, to what Gormally calls “existential dignity,” the dignity or excellence to be had in living ethically up to the demands that are made on one in virtue of being a person with constitutive dignity. Since this is a normative sense of dignity, one can fail to live up to that dignity and thus “possess” dignity to a different degree than some other human being, even as one remains equal in constitutive dignity to all other human beings. Similarly, it is clearly possible to treat a human being in ways not in accordance with his dignity, another type of normative failing. It is perfectly sensible to say this, however, and say that the person so treated does not lose any of his or her (constitutive, connatural, or intrinsic) dignity, or decline in dignity at all. Finally, because dignity signifies a form of excellence that traverses ontological and normative considerations, the understanding and realization of which can be variable and socially dependent, it is clear that different societies (or persons) will have different appreciations for the notion, realize that notion in their social practices and ways of life in different ways, in, indeed, to different degrees. Some such societal (or personal) understandings and realizations will be deficient, perhaps radically so. The concept of dignity might, at such a point, be only very tenuously connected to the concept here articulated and might, as Pinker argues, be a source of positive harm, again without ever impugning the core idea of dignity identified by the Catholic tradition. So while Pinker’s objections serve to point out ambiguities and possible confusions, they do not serve to vitiate the possibility of dignity playing a key role at the foundations of ethics and bioethics. But there is still the related challenge, most clearly stated by Harris, that dignity is “comprehensively vague.” Is it possible for the concept to be given more bite normatively, such that it plays a role in the generation of substantive, contentful moral norms? To conclude this section, I wish to show a way forward—one that will give 6244-013-P1-003.indd 60 9/4/2012 6:42:27 PM A Catholic Perspective on Human Dignity 61 an important but not foundational role to the concept of dignity in ethical deliberation. The way forward on this matter is indicated, I believe, in some key remarks made by the Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et Spes, by Pope John Paul II in his encyclicals Veritatis splendor and Evangelium vitae, and, above all, by the insights of the Thomistic tradition of thought about the natural law. As I have noted, the respect in which human persons have constitutive dignity is one that traverses both ontological and normative dimensions. Human persons are created in God’s image and free and rational; but to partake in such a nature is to be presented with a normative task, characterized by Gaudium et Spes as that of living as a gift. Yet even living as a gift for another can only be possible for us as a fulfillment of our nature; it could not be good were it divorced from our capacities, the fulfillment of which is our actualization and perfection as persons. Philosophically, then, the question is this: how is the normative dimension of our dignity—the task with which, as persons, we are presented— to be understood as itself a fulfillment of our nature, such that it is also our good? Note the two-fold direction here, towards the good of both others and ourselves, is itself indicated in the Council’s words: “man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.” (Second Vatican Council 1965b: no. 24, emphasis added) This question can only be answered by reflecting upon our knowledge of our good, and the nature of what we know to be our good. Following other thinkers in the Thomistic natural law tradition, and some hints by John Paul II as well, I believe that our good is known through practical reason as that which is desirable for us, because it promises some perfection, in action, for us. We can reflect upon the goods which are so known by noting that not all that we do is done for the sake of something further, as medicine is taken to achieve health. Rather, some ends are pursued for their own sake and give entirely intelligible answers to the question, “Why did you do that?” Such ends, which we can then understand as the promised goods of persons that are the grounds of our practical thinking, include human life, skilled performance, aesthetic experience, friendship, marriage, personal integrity, and a harmonious relationship with whatever greater than human source of meaning there may or may not be. These ends, or goods, are aspects of the well-being of all persons; our normative task, as John Paul makes clear in his discussion of the Ten Commandments, is to protect and serve these goods in all persons; our fulfillment is to be found only in the communion that is instantiated through action for the good in the person of others; a life lived only for the good in one’s person would be deficient precisely from the standpoint of human flourishing, 6244-013-P1-003.indd 61 9/4/2012 6:42:27 PM 62 Christopher Tollefsen failing to achieve some goods altogether, and achieving no good as successfully as it could be achieved in communion with others. How can we return this discussion to the question of dignity and its moral content, or lack thereof? It is only with the horizon of human goods in practical focus that the dignity of human beings, and the demands of that dignity, can be fully known. For it is, as I noted in quoting Saint Thomas earlier, by our reasoned and free relation to these goods that we are beings who have a share in God’s providence for ourselves—that is, have dignity at all; and it is by our relation to these goods in an unrestricted way—not giving arbitrary preference to ourselves or those near to us—that we respect the dignity of all human beings. What should emerge from this discussion, then, is that it is true that, taken on its own, the notion of human dignity will not provide us with a rich, contentful, and clear account of the moral norms that should govern our action. Thus, absent a larger conceptual framework, which includes, at its fullest, normative, metaphysical, and religious elements, “dignity” will simply not do the work in, for example, bioethics that is demanded of it by its opponents. But fitted within a natural law understanding of the human good, the task that dignity sets for each human being relative to all others can begin to be articulated, minimally, as a demand never intentionally to act against the goods of human persons, in oneself or another; more robustly, as a demand to foster and pursue human goods in creative, fair, and sustained ways, in our own person and that of others. This approach has immediate consequences in the domain of bioethics, some of which I shall address here, before turning in the final section to the remaining criticism of dignity. Life Issues I earlier noted that the dignity of the human person was not divorced, in its nature or consequences, from the bodily existence of such persons. While no corporeal being without a soul could possess the spiritual faculties necessary for dignity, we are not identical to our soul but are rather spiritual animals, bodily beings whose existence nevertheless transcends material limitations. This bodily existence is reflected in the basic goods of persons, among which are the goods of life and health; skilled performance (which, in many cases, is bodily); aesthetic experience (in which aesthetic form is mediated by sensory experience); and marriage and friendship, both of which, but especially the former, have bodily dimensions. Of most importance here is the good of life and health; if human beings are bodily persons for whom life is a basic good, never to be intentionally acted against, then it becomes intelligible why, in John Paul II’s work, abortion, suicide, and euthanasia were considered such great violations of human dignity. And, because our life is normatively to be lived in a relation of self-giving to others, a self-giving that is both our own fulfillment but also only to be understood in relation to the 6244-013-P1-003.indd 62 9/4/2012 6:42:27 PM A Catholic Perspective on Human Dignity 63 basic goods, our own violations of these goods in respect to others, as when we choose an abortion of an unborn human child or assist in the euthanasia or suicide of another, are likewise to be seen as violations of our own dignity, as Gaudium et Spes made clear: ultimately, “they do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury” (Second Vatican Council 1965b: no. 27). Reproductive Technologies It is well beyond the scope of this essay to enter into the details of Catholic teaching on reproductive matters. But central to that teaching where assisted reproductive technologies, such as in vitro fertilization, artificial insemination, and human cloning are concerned, is the notion of human dignity, particularly as it is implicated in the idea that man’s life—the life of each human being—is a gift from God, the result of divine love, and that this gift-of-love status must be replicated in our human attitudes toward, and practices of, procreation. Thus, when children are conceived as the fruit of marital embrace, in which husband and wife become one flesh as a reinstantiation of their mutual commitment to a complete sharing of lives, the Church sees the dignity of ensuing children as respected and protected: they are not chosen, per se, by the couple, but accepted as a gift, conceived in love with the cooperation of the divine. By contrast, when would-be parents exercise a technological control over the process of reproduction and turn toward a making, rather than a begetting, of children, then they are seen to adopt an attitude of control and domination over the origins of human life that is, at least at that origin point, inconsistent with the radical equality of human dignity. Technological assistance is thus only acceptable, in the Catholic tradition, insofar as it aids married couples in procreation as an outcome of marital sexual intercourse: drugs and surgical treatments to ensure ovulation, for example, are permissible within this framework. The Right to Health Care Within an understanding of human dignity as a task, whose horizons are set by basic goods, including the good of life and health, human beings are presented with strong and exigent good Samaritan obligations. When a human being is in grave need and another can provide the necessary assistance without threatening her own welfare, there are obligations of charity. But health care needs are among the most significant that human agents possess; and, in some cases, those needs will be better addressed not by one-off attempts by individuals to come to the assistance of those in need but by the assistance of groups whose members are brought together by a shared commitment to meeting the needs of others. Yet even these voluntary or mediating associations require coordination, and occasionally positive supplementation in 6244-013-P1-003.indd 63 9/4/2012 6:42:27 PM 64 Christopher Tollefsen their efforts, lest some unfairly go wanting while the needs of others are met. There thus can be a positive role, demanded in justice, for the state to provide assistance along the axis of the good of life and health (Boyle 1977, 1996, 2001). And this obligation, for reasons that will be articulated further in the next section, can be seen from a different perspective as a right, on the part of those in need, to the necessary health care. Catholic teaching has thus embraced a right to health care in developed nations and pointed, as it does in its condemnation of abortion, to human dignity as a grounding concept here. DIGNITY AND LIBERALISM The final challenge to the account of dignity presented here—an account that has taken its cue, to be sure, from Catholic teachings and scholarship of the second half of the 20th century—comes from within the Catholic tradition. Robert Kraynak has acknowledged this recent emphasis on human dignity as a function of human freedom and reason, but argued that this represents a Kantian turn in Christianity, with potentially pernicious consequences. In particular, Kantian-inspired dignity claims are used to generate further rights claims (as, in the previous section, we could speak of the right to life, the rights of children to come into existence as the fruit of loving marital union, and the right to health care); and these rights claims constitute, in Kraynak’s words, “essentially ungrateful claims against authority” (Kraynak 2001: 172). Moreover, in the absence of robust authority claims, particularly religious authority claims, and with no more than a Kantian grounding in the self-legislating autonomy of the will to buttress it, the concept of human dignity can quickly become denuded of any more content than the demand that human beings be able to live their lives however they see fit. Kraynak thus sees contemporary liberalism as pervaded by skepticism about the good as an input of the dignity framework as well as inclined toward a soulless consumerism as an output of that same framework. Mediating this input and output is a commitment to liberal democracy: demanded by skepticism, resulting in mass society. Yet the Christian churches, and especially the Catholic Church, have embraced not just dignity but also dignity as a route to a defense of democracy; Kraynak argues that this embrace is simply too dangerously close to liberal dignity, skepticism, and democracy for Christians to accept the new emphasis with equanimity. Kraynak’s argument can perhaps be intellectually situated in the following way. There can be no doubt that the Catholic Church and its main leaders, teachers, and intellectuals of the past half-century have expressed in numerous ways dismay at the direction taken by contemporary liberal democracy: a widespread relativism and a rejection of religion have led to what John Paul called “the eclipse of God and man” and the “culture of 6244-013-P1-003.indd 64 9/4/2012 6:42:27 PM A Catholic Perspective on Human Dignity 65 death.” Yet, at the same time, most of the key thinkers of this same period have argued for a political understanding, a moral understanding, and an ecclesiological understanding that have taken some of the very same concepts of contemporary liberal skepticism as key terms: freedom, equality, self-governance, and, as encapsulating all of these, dignity. An argument could be made, therefore, that such Catholic thought represents the “true” liberalism: committed to the freedom and equality of all persons, yet critical of the understanding of these notions that pervades a largely secular society. Yet Kraynak wishes to critique these commitments from without, not, as the Church increasingly has, from within, by returning to an earlier (allegedly Augustinian) understanding of the relationship between the Church and politics and of the nature and dignity of the human person: less emphasis on freedom, more emphasis on the immortality of the soul and the call to holiness. To my mind, the various criticisms—for example, those in an issue of The Catholic Social Science Review devoted to Kraynak’s book—that have been made of Kraynak’s project are convincing and largely confirm the direction that this essay has taken. Contrary to Kraynak’s hesitance at the embrace of freedom, W. Norris Clarke has shown that freedom is pervasive in the Christian tradition in understanding the imago Dei; but Clarke similarly shows that this freedom is a key aspect of our special relatedness to God, and to the good that God has set for us (Clarke 2004; see also Clarke 1992). There simply is no freedom without the good, certainly not in a rootless ability to legislate for oneself one’s ends and goods. Likewise, Gregory Beabout has shown that this orientation of our freedom to our good is, at the same time, as I have emphasized, an orientation toward a task, the task identified by Gaudium et Spes as the “sincere gift of self.” Moreover, Beabout finds in the Second Vatican Council ample evidence that our freedom is, as it was for Saint Thomas, “self-determining, but not self-legislating” (Beabout 2004). Thus, we are a far cry from ungrateful claims against authority when the Council undertakes to articulate, in the first chapter of Gaudium et Spes, “The Dignity of the Human Person,” and goes on to make various rights claims on behalf of all persons. Further, in the work of John Finnis, we see a convincing account of the nature of such rights that sees them as complementary to claims of duty, yet available “for reporting and asserting the requirements of justice from the point of view of the person(s) who benefit(s) from that relationship” (Finnis 1980: 205; see also Lewis 2009). There can be no articulation of valid rights claims, within such framework, absent a full understanding of the demands of justice and the common good; an individualistic framework is simply not at work here. Finally, in the natural law undergirdings of the normative task of human dignity, we find little to match the skepticism of contemporary liberalism. The Catholic conception of human dignity should thus be seen as the paradigm understanding of human dignity, refracted in contemporary society through a cracked and smudged lens: what is seen in contemporary 6244-013-P1-003.indd 65 9/4/2012 6:42:27 PM 66 Christopher Tollefsen liberalism is real, and the vision has led to genuine goods, such as religious freedom. But the Catholic vision is clearer, and has in its sights a concept that redounds only to the good of the human person and the glory of God. The Catholic conception is, of course, a thick, substantive, and even “comprehensive” conception. It is thus opposed by those versions of contemporary liberal theory that hold that only “neutral” reasons, or reasons that can be disengaged from conceptions of human good and well-being, or from substantive “worldviews” may be raised, considered, and addressed in public discourse. This restrictive view of liberalism thus stands as a final challenge to the Catholic concept of human dignity, if that account is to have a role in the public square. These liberal demands for neutrality, as many people have noted, are themselves far from neutral (Neuhaus 1984). They rest upon a particular conception of the human person and of human freedom, according to which it is an affront to human dignity to be “coerced” in accordance with reasons that are not one’s own. This conception is not shared by those who believe, for example, that freedom is valuable for persons only insofar as it is oriented toward the truth, and that the freedom of unreasoned self-assertion is, in fact, damaging to human character and welfare. But if the demand for neutrality depends upon a particular substantive view, then it cannot be carried out without falling afoul of its own requirements. Nor, on their own merits, are such requirements reasonable. To refuse to listen to reasons—evidence put forth to defend a claim as true—is unreasonable, and to refuse to allow such reasons to be put forth in the public square is unjust—it unfairly restricts some citizens’ participation in the public conversation on arbitrary grounds. So our public conversation on matters of public weight and importance should be unfettered, as regards the kinds of reasons that are permitted. There is thus reasonable space, within liberalism, corrected of its skeptical and restrictive errors, for the contributions which the Catholic account of dignity can make. This concept is indeed an apt, and essential, concept for use at the foundations of moral, political, and religious thought. NOTE 1. The unity between husband and wife is further sacramentalized as a sign of Christ’s relation to His Church. 6244-013-P1-003.indd 66 9/4/2012 6:42:27 PM