On Human Dignity

by James Beauregard

My first trip to the International Conference on Persons was the conference held at the University of Lund Sweden in August 2013. A few months earlier, I had emailed Jan Olaf Bengtsson about his entry on personal in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and in the conversation that followed he invited me to submit an abstract for consideration for the 13th ICP, and then, suddenly, I was walking down the oldest street in Scandinavia, learning to say, "hey hey” in greeting upon entering the city’s many shops, and, in the company of Dick Prust, learning that Lund has some excellent Italian restaurants.

At the opening event for the conference, I was very vivid memory of Randy Auxier getting us organized and ready to go, and not infrequently I recall his brief comments on human dignity as something that ought to be concerned with. This is an enormously refreshing, moving as I often do in a clinical, medical and scientific world in which such considerations tend to be raised only on occasion and bioethics committees.

The question of dignity, though, is bigger than that and I'm in agreement with Randy that it is something about which all Personalist thinkers ought to be concerned. Being an academic as well as a clinician, one of the recent ways that concern emerged was in a review of book on human dignity and bioethics that I wrote for the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, and, if any further proof was needed that no good deed goes unpunished, I was asked by the I was ultimately asked by editors to do a podcast on human dignity. Needless to say, this has caused me to think of some length about it, as have my discussions with my British friend and colleague Simon Smith, is an ongoing part of our transatlantic discussion.

What is dignity and how is it grounded? As is the case with many questions of philosophy, the answer begins somewhere else, and specifically with persons. Dignity questions are, I would suggest, at the root ontological and epistemological ones which bear fruit in philosophical anthropology and ethics. The 13th ICP was fertile ground for all of these, as the Anglo-American and European traditions of personalism came into a more conscious conversation.

Some years ago, neuroscientist Ruth Macklin referred to dignity as a “useless concept” when speaking of the field of bioethics, and instead argued that concepts such as "autonomy" will be much more useful, the term dignity being far too vague to be useful. But, our autonomy and dignity the same thing? The latter seems far more extensive than the former, and respect for autonomy really can't cover all of the issues that are rising concerns about human dignity and human rights, and a becoming ever increasingly intertwined in contemporary discourse.

What’s needed in the end is a robust and full throated conception of persons out of which a defensible concept of dignity can flow.