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diggHuman dignity, what a stupid idea!
At least, that’s what a psychology professor at Harvard thinks.
In the minds of most
people, human dignity is a cornerstone of bioethics. After all, bioethics was
partly inspired by horrific abuses of human dignity by Nazi doctors. To protect
it, the new United Nations ratified in 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. This recognised "the inherent dignity and... the equal and
inalienable rights of all members of the human family". And nearly 40
national constitutions ratified since World War II have referred explicitly to
human dignity. Like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, human dignity
is one of those notions that is part of the air we breathe.
But not, it turns out, the air breathed by professional bioethicists. In fact, low-intensity academic warfare is sputtering along over a 2003 proposal by Ruth Macklin, at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, that "human dignity" (scare quotes essential) should be junked. This doesn’t mean that she wanted to ill-treat people. Rather, she regarded the two words as highfalutin baggage smuggled in from religion which can and should be discarded. They were either too vague to be meaningful or they simply restated other notions, such as respect for autonomy or capacity for rational thought.
The controversy provoked the President’s Council for Bioethics, a government study group set up by President Bush, to respond with a fat book of essays which, for the most part, defend the disputed notion. And this in turn provoked Steven Pinker to rebut it in the most influential opinion journal in the US, The New Republic, under the inflammatory headline, "The Stupidity of Dignity".
If you haven’t heard of Steven Pinker, you obviously don’t read the New York Times much. He is one of America’s top public intellectuals, with a number of best-selling books on how the mind and language work to his credit. Back in 2004 Time magazine called him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He is also a professor of evolutionary psychology at Harvard University, which gives his theory even more weight. And this theory, repeated over and over in his writings, is that "the mind is what the brain does". This is more or less the theme of his book, How the Mind Works. It is an increasing popular view among neuroscientists.
Surprisingly for a distinguished academic, most of what Pinker had to say was more or less personal abuse. He attacked the Council as a body stacked with Catholic "theocons" and led by a conservative Jew, Leon Kass, whom he calls "pro-death" and "anti-freedom". It all sounded a bit like Rush Limbaugh on Hillary Clinton. But I admit that I became seriously disturbed when Pinker quoted Kass's severe condemnation of the practice of licking ice cream cones in public places as inconsistent with human dignity. No way José. Triple-scoop raspberry sherbets are not something I am going to give up, even for the sake of human dignity.
Thankfully, though, I took a deep breath and read on. Dr Kass is the author of numerous books and his views on ice cream must have come from one of them, but they did not appear in the Council’s collection of essays. Pinker had been beating America's leading defender of "human dignity" over the head with a red herring, which is even more undignified than slurping in public.
No doubt there is a personal element in this dust-up. This is not the first clash between the two scholars. Writing in the journal Commentary last year, Kass's defence of a non-materialist account of human nature against the Harvard academic was scathing: "One hardly knows which is the more impressive, the height of Pinker’s arrogance or the depth of his shallowness... he does not understand that the empowering organization of materials -- the vital form -- is not itself material." Perhaps Pinker was still feeling the sting of the lash.
Eventually, however, Pinker’s spleen dribbled away and he came to grips with "human dignity" itself. He criticised it for being relative (some people find public consumption of ice cream dignified), fungible (colonoscopies are undignified and we willing endure them), and harmful (think of Saddam Hussein’s highly dignified military parades). Human dignity, it seems, is a nasty business. It puts us at risk of being arrested by "the ice cream police" for perfectly acceptable things like therapeutic cloning. Why rabbit on about the "squishy, subjective notion" of dignity when you can jog along perfectly well with clear, sharp-edged ideas like autonomy and respect for persons?
Come again?
While “human dignity” is an idea which certainly requires extensive clarification and precise definition, “respect for persons” and “autonomy” are as squishy as a wet sponge. I would have thought that a Harvard prof would be more discerning. For instance, are dolphins or chimpanzees “persons”, too? Should Japanese fishermen be jailed for violating the person rights of minke whales? And is a sleeping person autonomous? A comatose person? A two-day-old infant?
Along with human dignity, Pinker seems to have jettisoned 2,500 years of non-materialist Western philosophy. Man, homo sapiens, is an animal, but in the words of Aristotle, he is a rational animal. Any analysis of man which fails to take into account his evident non-material capacity for beauty, or abstraction, or dreams of the future will inevitably put human dignity between scare quotes. Pinker, astonishingly, is virtually blind to philosophical discourse. This explains why he zeroes in on Kass’s scandalous opinions on ice cream cones and ignores his defence of man’s capacity for "reason, freedom, judgment, and moral concern”. Dialoguing with Pinker about human dignity is rather like discussing the chemistry of H2O with someone who doesn’t believe in oxygen.
When I began to read Pinker’s article, I was filled with foreboding about the future of bioethics. But by the end, I realized that it was far from bad news. If the best way to construct a philosophical defence of therapeutic cloning, for instance, is to throw “human dignity” overboard, people will think twice about it. While ridiculing human dignity may raise a few chuckles in the Harvard Faculty Club, it will never play in Peoria. Denigrating human dignity is a brain wave without a future.
Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.
Dear Fr. Gearkart:
Thanks for your comment. The link I provided above is complete; it is “broken” only because the posting system truncates the clickable link to the first two lines. A short link is here: http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/. The relavant post is easily found; it also has links to the response by Yuval Levin.
I have also responded to you on my blog, but let me summarize here: while the discussion about what we mean by “dignity” as opposed to the principle of autonomy is important and interesting, it should not distract for the core issue, which is when, why and at what cost do we allow our government to further limit personal autonomy for the purpose of better securing “dignity”. Using the state to further the personal preferences of some groups at the expense of limiting the personal autonomy of others is a very dangerous proposition, as history and modern affairs tell us so well.
Father Gearhart said: “Nevertheless, I believe you will find, if you look hard enough, that there is no logical contradiction in the coupled hypothesis that God is omniscient and human free will is real. If God’s knowing were based on calculation, however, there would be a contradiction.”
I think God’s knowing is the contradiction, under any circumstances. I think that an omniscient God, as I assume you envision him, is fundamentally incompatible with free will. The fact of knowing eliminates the possibility of free will. An all knowing God who created us is incompatible with free will because, if he knew everything we would ever do but created us that way anyway, then not only is free will not possible but God is responsible for our sins. Without free will sin and punishment for sin are illogical. The edifice collapses. We are created by God, God knows everything we will ever do, God is angry when we do it. I don’t think Mathematics can get you around that contradiction. Mathematics is relevant to determinism but we are not talking about determinism here. We are talking about free will. As I said above, without free will life is meaningless. I believe in free will.
TokyoTom, I have responded to your post on your own site. Incidentally, the link you gave is broken.
David, mathematics (and physics, including what Stephen Hawking calls “the hypothesis of scientific determinism”—otherwise referred to as the law of causality, amended, but not broken, by quantum randomness—which lies at the heart of all motivation for scientific investigation) is perfectly relevant to the question of determinism. The deep question I attempted to raise at the beginning was this, given that state of affairs, for which the scientific consensus is broad and deep, how can one approach the question of free will? John Polkinghorne and many others have asked the same question. Polkinghorne’s approach is to find room for the will of the soul to enter reality through probabilistic manipulation of quantum events. This view is quite consistent with quantum theory, apart from the question of the random probabilities involved. It seems a small intellectual price to pay for the miracle of free will, if it is an intellectual price at all.
As to your other, more serious point, about God’s knowledge and free will, I confess to you that is is quite reasonable to be skeptical of either God’s omniscience or free will, given the weight of the facts involved. Nevertheless, I believe you will find, if you look hard enough, that there is no logical contradiction in the coupled hypothesis that God is omniscient and human free will is real. If God’s knowing were based on calculation, however, there would be a contradiction.
Paul Michael said: “To object that this “requires” God to be bound to time is irrelevant. It’s not God who is bound to time, it’s the humans in the conversation.”
If God knows everything (this is hypothetical, I’m not a believer) and is not bound to space and time then he knows everything that we will ever do when he creates us. Actually, before he creates us, if ‘before’ has any meaning to a Being who is not bound to space and time. Actually to the Space/Time Continuum, since space and time have no meaning separate from one another. The point is, if everything is known, even by God, then free will is not possible. That’s not my position. Without free will life really would be meaningless.
Father Gearhart, you’ve brought up mathematics before in a similar discussion. My opinion is that mathematics is not relevant to a discussion of free will because, in this context, it only deals with the predictability of things not animated by consciousness.
Yuval Levin, former executive director of the President’s Council, has also stepped up to defense Katz.
But everybody seems to be missing Pinker’s very fair point about the role of government in bioethics disputes, as I note here:
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2008/05/29/indignance-over-steven-pinker-s-quot-undignified-quot-attack-
on-a-federal-bioethics-panel-s-review-of-human-quot-dignity-quot.aspx
“In the same way, human behavior can be utterly predictable (like Immanuel Kant’s morning walk) or unpredictable (like the blow up of someone with a bad temper) whether or not free will is genuinely involved.”
Fr. Gearhart, if people can be predictable or unpredictable whether or not free will is involved, how can we find out whether or not free will really IS involved? Are we reduced to simply assuming, based on certain hypotheses either religious or secular, that free will does or doesn’t exist? Note that there can be religious or secular theories for both sides, either saying free will does exist or doesn’t.
Let me make a appeal for a patient continuation of this argument, Father Gearhart. David’s question, “Can God predict with certainty?” appears to strike at your claim that a deterministic world can be unpredictable. My thought has always been that a probabilistic description of a deterministic world is only necessary because we humans lack full information - about the position of an electron in an orbital and the forces that act on it, for example, or about the status of one’s neurotransmitters in the prediction of human behavior. An omniscient God could then predict any outcome of any situation, if God chose to answer the query of a humble human.
To object that this “requires” God to be bound to time is irrelevant. It’s not God who is bound to time, it’s the humans in the conversation. Should God feel disposed to answer a human’s query and make a prediction, it would not bind God to time or space in any way (at least no more than it would to answer a prayer, create a universe, or send a Messiah to walk among us).
Father Gearhart, then how is free will possible if all is known?
David, if there is a God, a God who created the space-time universe, then that God is not bound to time in any way. It makes no sense to require such a God to “predict” when all of creation is present to him.
By the way, Father Gearhart, The word ‘created’ is also bound to time.
Fr. Larry Gearhart said: “Is that a serious question, David? It suggests that you believe God’s existence is bound to time in some way. Then who created the space-time universe?”
It’s a question. It doesn’t suggest I believe anything. I was wondering how free will ties in to a totally predictable Universe, even if the predictor is God. I think the question of who created the Universe, ‘why is there something instead of nothing’, has yet to be answered.
Is that a serious question, David? It suggests that you believe God’s existence is bound to time in some way. Then who created the space-time universe?
Can God predict with certainty?
One last technical observation before I give up trying to make this topic clear. Determinism, whether probabilistic or not, is not the same thing as predictability. Something can be absolutely deterministic without being predictable. For example, although the mathematician Alan Turing proved that it may or may not be provable whether a given deterministic Turing Machine program will ever come to a halt. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem. One can demonstrate that the roll of a pair of dice follows a “predictable” binomial probability, without being able to predict, with certainty, the next toss. In the same way, human behavior can be utterly predictable (like Immanuel Kant’s morning walk) or unpredictable (like the blow up of someone with a bad temper) whether or not free will is genuinely involved.
Fr. Gearhart, Hawking is only one man. Hardly enough to prove there is a ‘consensus’.
As well, in many instances I do find people, broadly speaking, predictable. I know that my father reacts badly to some subjects and lets his temper boil over, and I know that my mother has certain times when she shouldn’t be bothered. I can predict what will happen. She’ll get annoyed at me and start getting angry. I can’t predict the particulars, but I can predict the broad outline.
I can’t predict everyone’s probable actions and reactions this way, but I think it’s because I’m not as familiar with everyone else as with my family.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that people tend to fall into familiar patterns in their daily lives, which they follow again and again. People are unpredictable when they are first forming these patterns, but once the patterns become stable they are quite predictable in their actions. So there seems to be a mix of the predictable and unpredictable. Unpredictable when they are first finding their way, then predictable when they become stable in their lifestyle.
Is this determinism? I don’t think so, because the predictability can always be shattered, the stable life robbed of it’s stability, forcing the creation of a new, and probably different, pattern. People only tend to fall into patterns like this. what pattern they fall into isn’t set in stone.
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