Mark D. White

An article in the new issue of Bioethics (25/1, January 2011) by Inmaculada de Melo-Martín titled "Human Dignity in International Policy Documents: A Useful Criterion for Public Policy?" examines several EU documents governing enbryo research to see if their regulations motivated by proecting human dignity are useful, informative, and/or effective.

From the abstract:

I argue that by using human dignity as a criterion to determine the permissibility of particular human embryo research practices, these documents cannot aid in identifying research that would be contrary to human dignity. Thus, they fail to guide public policy on embryo experimentation. Their use of human dignity as a criterion makes their task of offering guidance unfeasible because the concept as used in these documents is too vague and is applied in contradictory ways. I discuss the main goals of these documents and their claims in relation to human embryo research. I then discuss how they have influenced public policy in several countries. Finally, I show that although these Council of Europe treaties attempt to serve as public policy guides in the area of embryo research, they fail to do so.

She concludes that given the vagueness of the conception of dignity, the uncertainty of whether dignity applies to embryos, and the different cultural value systems in the constituent countries, the concept of dignity has little use and may lead to a least cmmon denominator effect in which the term is reduced to whatever weak meaning the member countires can agree on:

This conclusion reminds me of Helen Knowles' paper "Courting Dignity," in which she examines the use of the term dignity in U.S. Supreme Court decisions, and Michael Dorf's 2008 blog post "Give Me Dignity or Give Me Death," which is critical of the ambiguous meaning of the term in (then) recent judicial opinions.

It's easy for Kantians (like me) to proclaim dignity to be, at bottom, the ultimate foundation for all legal and policy decisions, but we must be mindful that ours is not the one and only accepted meaning of the term; Alan Gewirth's sense of dignity is much more supportive of positive welfare rights, for instance. (See my paper "Kantian Dignity and Social Economics" for more.) But it would be tragic, given its central importance to so many systems of thought, if some common ground cannot be found to guide decisions in policy and law, especially since the disputes in which dignity is likely to be invoked are also likely to be among the most morally critical ones.