[MD] The Stupidity of Dignity

[Ham Priday]

Hi Platt --

> Steven Pinker has written a fascinating article entitled "The Stupidity of
> Dignity" that challenges moral arguments preventing life-enhancing medical
> experiments in altering minds and bodies. Coming under the heading of
> "bioethics" the article should prove of interest to Pirsigians.
>
> I think Ham will find it especially relevant as Pinker emphasizes the
> principle of individual autonomy, but everyone will find the moral issues
> relevant to the MOQ.

An interesting and unusual aspect of morality well reported.  Of course I 
was sympathetic with the stance of Ruth Macklin, a member of the President's 
Council on Human Dignity and Bioethics, which is reported as follows:

"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.  Whatever that is.  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.'  Macklin argued that bioethics has done just fine with the 
principle of personal autonomy--the idea that, because all humans have the 
same minimum capacity to suffer, prosper, reason, and choose, no human has 
the right to impinge on the life, body, or freedom of another.  This is why 
informed consent serves as the bedrock of ethical research and practice, and 
it clearly rules out the kinds of abuses that led to the birth of bioethics 
in the first place, such as Mengele's sadistic pseudoexperiments in Nazi 
Germany and the withholding of treatment to indigent black patients in the 
infamous Tuskegee syphilis study.  Once you recognize the principle of 
autonomy, Macklin argued, 'dignity' adds nothing."

When a person is making a public speech, we generally regard that as 
"dignified" behavior.  When the same person is subjected to a rectal exam, 
we regard it as an "indignity".  Does the meaning of human dignity really 
suggest some universal moral principle beyond esthetic sensibility?

But what particularly interested me was Pinker's assertion that "dignity has 
three features that undermine any possibility of using it as a foundation 
for bioethics.
First, dignity is relative...second, dignity is fungible...third, dignity 
can be harmful."
I would contend that the same could be said of Morality--especially when it 
is forced on society in order to make behavior conform to some authoritative 
system.

Pinker concludes ...
"A free society disempowers the state from enforcing a conception of dignity 
on its citizens.  Democratic governments allow satirists to poke fun at 
their leaders, institutions, and social mores.  And they abjure any mandate 
to define 'some vision of 'the good life' or the 'dignity of using [freedom] 
well' (two quotes from the Council's volume).  The price of freedom is 
tolerating behavior by others that may be undignified by our own lights.  I 
would be happy if Britney Spears and "American Idol" would go away, but I 
put up with them in return for not having to worry about being arrested by 
the ice-cream police.  This trade-off is very much in America's DNA and is 
one of its great contributions to civilization: my country 'tis of thee, 
sweet land of liberty."

I say, more power to Pinker!

Thanks, Platt.

--Ham