In comments below on my post about Yuval Levin’s book, Imagining the Future, Michael Peterson asks: “Will someone, somewhere, define human dignity?” Not me, at least not in this post…but here’s an account of what needs to happen first. One of the best passages in Yuval’s book is a dissection of a certain problem conservatives confront in arguing about bioethics. The right, he tells us,
must transform moral sentiments into arguments for morality. Its chief ally in this effort is the deep moral wisdom at the heart of our civilization — by which most Americans live their lives. But the effort itself can pose real risks to precisely the character of that wisdom. The nature of both modern science and modern politics demands that the argument proceed in this way. Both incessantly unveil the veiled and shine light on hidden things. We gain much that is immensely beneficial from both, but we risk losing much if the process of transforming sentiments into arguments is not carried out properly [...] (128).
For Yuval, the conflict is between the “implicitly mysterious taboo” and the “explicitly known and meticulously scrutinized object” (127). For a number of reasons, I prefer to speak of things forbidden or interdicted instead of things that are taboo; foremost among them, I suppose, is that I think Philip Rieff is right that ancient cultures organized around fate viewed taboos as pertaining to power whereas Jewish and Christian cultures organized around faith viewed interdicts as pertaining to authority. But I also want to suggest that we should distinguish between nouns and verbs that are forbidden, or to be hidden, or shameful, and so on. Because Yuval also notes incisively that the concealed or tacit or secret in our lives, when subject to the forces of contemporary science, becomes “an event wide open to a variety of experimental manipulations” (126). Some forbidden things are forbidden deeds or occurrences which are dragged out into the light to be interacted with in many new ways. But some forbidden things are concrete nouns. And I think I’m safe in saying that one of the ways in which we tend to destroy the forbidden or ‘stigmatized’ character of some nouns is by redescribing them as mere bundles of events or occurances. Scrutinizing an event is a different experience, with different moral implications, than scrutinizing an object. It is perhaps analogous or tantamount to the difference between beholding an image and beholding the real thing the image represents.
Strangely, however, in an effort to maintain the moral sentiments which attach incoherently or inchoately to things kept hidden and secret — things that might be forbidden but might not, and might even be sacred — Yuval finds himself falling back on the virtual language more applicable to the experience of events and images than nouns and realities. Moral sentiments, it turns out, are ‘senses of’ things. Yuval wants conservatives to “develop and articulate a coherent worldview,” especially with regard to “loosely defined terms like ‘human dignity’” (129), and rightly so; but it is hard to tell whether this requires or actually ‘cashes out’ as a “sense of the appropriate uses and limits of human power,” a “sense of what is humanly important,” a “sense of what the future may plausibly bring,” and a “sense of responsibility” (130-31). Yuval winds up leaving us with the paradoxical notion of an “explicit sense of the world” (129).
All this puts me in mind of George Kateb’s introduction to his book The Inner Ocean, a collection of essays that defend the individual, as liberals are apt to do, on the basis of rights. Kateb admits doubt that “Mill would have remained absolute” in his defense of “‘self-regarding’ activity” had he “taken up certain cases that unawareness or decorum prevented him from discussing” — cases like “consensual incest between adults, the use of addictive drugs, voluntary slavery, extreme sadomasochism, nonhomicidal cannibalism, necrophilia, bestiality, and voluntary acceptance of one’s own sacrifice” (13), all things that Kateb rejects as individual rights. He justifies these exclusions by announcing “no right to accept another’s renunciation of a right” (13), but obviously this is as ‘principled’ a stance as the stance against ‘extreme’ sadomasochism, and slips quickly into tautology (whatever you can’t renounce must be a right, and whatever you can, not). Yet Kateb recoils from the determination that these bad things must also be banned things because they “injure the human dignity of people who do them” (14). Since Kateb does not “associate human dignity with any teleology or reason for being,” however, he is forced to raise “in dismay” the fact that he is “not able to deal” with the issue “adequately” (14). He sighs:
Let us say that a society of rights-based individualism encourages these and other crepuscular activities to become topics for open and popular discussion; that that fact can be taken as a paradoxical sign of the moral grandness of such a society, for practically every desire can be honestly admitted and talked about despite shame or without shame [...] (14).
Here a liberal winds up in the same predicament Yuval diagnoses among conservatives. It turns out that contemporary science and politics alike cause us to treat forbidden things precisely as if they were not forbidden — as the precondition of forming our ‘value judgments’ about them! But why? Perhaps the culprit is scientific and political individualism — methodologically individualist in the first case and rights-based in the second. We have discovered that both these kinds of individualism are in fact corrosive to individual identity. Methodological individualism tells us that only large-n statistical studies, in which the individual is minimized to his or her most interchangeable, can produce usable knowledge; rights-based individualism tells us that people must be allowed to interact expressively in ways that disrupt and undermine the boundaries of personal integrity as long as they want to and ‘aren’t hurting anybody’, although we all recognize that the ‘line’ between what counts as hurting and what doesn’t is, by the lights of rights, arbitrary or inexplicable. So the inevitable result is ‘unrebuttable’ personal testimonies about how you can commit incest and still be a perfectly normal person.
Scientific and political individualism seem to put the definition of dignity in the hands of individuals. But it turns out that they really put the definition of individual in the hands of individuals; no matter what people do to themselves and one another, they appeal to the same basic concept of dignity to justify their acts. Only, they describe their acts as events which somehow fail to strip them of the individual character to which dignity attaches. We stop talking about what you have to do to remain intact as an individual (noun) and start talking almost exclusively about what you can do to experience individuality (verb, adjective, adverb, etc.). The full spectrum of experiences of individuality are said not to destroy dignity, but they corrode or undermine the very thing that it turns out dignity depends on — individual being, which, from this perspective, suddenly looks a lot different from individuality. Our integrity or identity as individuals is actually the precondition of our bearing dignity; dismayingly, we have it within our power to strip ourselves of dignity, even minimal dignity, because we have it within our power to fragment or even destroy our individual being.
What would seem to be needful, then, in order to have a productive conversation about the meaning of human dignity — and in order to preserve our liberal regime — is a prior theory of individual being which isn’t scientific or political.
September 16th, 2009 | 12:21 pm
All of this, of course, is a red herring. We’re not interested in doing thing like incest, voluntary slavery, necrophilia, or other disgusting things like that. We just want to cure aging so that we can live open-ended youthful life spans and increase our intelligence so that we can invent things like wormholes and warp drive so that we can spread about the galaxy. You know this about us as much as we do. To equate the desirability of curing aging and ending medical suffering with promulgation of necrophilia and the like is the worse sort of obfuscation of our goals. You know it as well as we do.
September 16th, 2009 | 12:30 pm
Well you’re right, kurt, that I should be clear that I’m NOT in fact trying to equate or hitch these two things. Though the bioethics debate is of great significance, Yuval’s project isn’t the same as my project; I’m more concerned with the novel ways we can already get freaky than the historical ways we can change human nature. So I really don’t at all intend to equate radical life extension with radical orgy extension. I do think Yuval’s treatment of the intellectual lay of the land and Kateb’s speak to some deeper issues that help us understand what’s at stake with the whole culture.
September 16th, 2009 | 1:12 pm
Is it possible to have any “human dignity” without God?
That to me is the fundamental question. I do not believe it is possible. For in the abscence of the transcendent, we truly are just “accidents” and cosmically meaningless. Dignity can’t accrue to something so trivial.
A false dignity, an aesthetic creation, is the only thing that could avoid despair in such a searing abscence.
Or so it seems.
September 16th, 2009 | 1:44 pm
This essay reminds me greatly of G.E.M. Anscombe’s comments in “Modern Moral Philosophy.” Her statement that “it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking” in particular seems to be what this blog posting is discussing.
September 16th, 2009 | 2:23 pm
“Is it possible to have any “human dignity” without God? ”
Mr. Lawson perhaps poses the question in more appropriate terms.
Schelling argues that Kant’s belief in noumena and phenomena (reflective consciousness) miss the point that Plato’s “ideas” were interpreted not as products of the mind but rather as ‘instructors’ and structured the mind. And, further that experience teaches that humans live in a wonderful, experiential, and mysterious world prior to beginning the process of differentiating this ‘world’ and its ‘things,’ e.g. “consciousness precedes self-consciousness.”
Man is created in the “image of God” or so it is said. Reason, it follows, exists within the self-affirmation of the absolute in human consciousness, “a primordial state of mind in which the affirmed and that which affirms are one.” And, from this Schelling derived his law of identity, the inherent law of reason and knowledge, where A=A.
Human dignity can only exist in this primordial condition, where “God is the only object of knowledge,” beyond that it is only a dream.
September 16th, 2009 | 4:51 pm
I should be clear that I’m NOT in fact trying to equate or hitch these two things.
You’re not> But many “conservative” bioethics people do (like Leon Kass).
I’m more concerned with the novel ways we can already get freaky…
I don’t really think about this much. I guess its not my nature to want to get freaky.
September 17th, 2009 | 9:33 am
rights-based individualism tells us that people must be allowed to interact expressively in ways that disrupt and undermine the boundaries of personal integrity as long as they want to and ‘aren’t hurting anybody’, although we all recognize that the ‘line’ between what counts as hurting and what doesn’t is, by the lights of rights, arbitrary or inexplicable
Not that I really disagree with this particular analysis, but if this kind of (political) ethos is bad because it damages “integrity,” which seems to be the same as the “dignity” that the Individual is the precondition for – then how is this not circular? What exactly is the criticism if the destruction of integrity/dignity is both the result and cause of the decay of the individual, who is both its precondition, and reliant upon it?
You statement that “we have it within our power to strip ourselves of dignity, even minimal dignity, because we have it within our power to fragment or even destroy our individual being” seems reversible based on earlier comments about rights-based individualism.
September 17th, 2009 | 9:51 am
I’m still working to find a vocabulary that isn’t too larded with prior, confusing meanings, but by ‘integrity’ I don’t mean ‘moral integrity’ but the character or property of the individual person understood as an irreducible, concrete thing. Our intuition today that thinking of individuals this way is to already think of them in moral terms of self-ownership or rights is, I think, an artifact; Nietzsche had lots positive to say about human beings who were “stones” and not fluid, deconstructed artists or actors — from the perspective of civilizations and regimes built to last out of uncompromising rank orders of value and rule. I’m trying to suggest that talking about dignity is going to be difficult or misleading if we’re working within a framework dominated by the kind of understanding of individuality we associate with expressivism, perspectivalism, and a host of different ‘sides’ to the self. My approach to the individual as an indivisible whole is coming out of the Reformation more than out of, say, Kant.
September 17th, 2009 | 12:09 pm
It’s pretty hard not to use a moral connotation there, unless you are thinking of the structural “integrity” of steel or something, how it can’t be broken down. I looked it up and apparently the Latin root is integer, ie entire, so there may be something there.
However, if you are trying to work with the individual as irreducible, you still have some ambiguity to hack through. Modern scientific reduction might be depersonalizing because the implication is that the sum does not equal a whole, ie Weber’s “demystification.” But you said you want to go back further.
If there was a positive Reformation vision of the irreducible individual, I think the primary implication was against some who assumed social groups to be irreducible: eg the peasantry. (obviously the social implications were based on an inherent level of nominalism in the ecclesiology and soteriology)
But if you want a positive vision of individual irreducible-ness from the Reformation, you might be looking for ways that the Reformation helped previously reduced persons. Here’s my best take on this one:
If there was a liberation of the individual in the early modern period, a liberalism from which we derive a better and more full idea of the individual than had earlier existed – then the earlier, pre-Reformation kind of “reduction” was reducing a person to fewer abilities and activities. So there were arguments against a kind of essentialism that the West had to confront.
If this is the kind of liberalism and individual you are going to drive your stake into, then you’ve certainly got the one with more vigor than today’s glutted individual. I don’t see how it would be possible to make a fully accepted argument here, because you are fighting a declension of civilizational morale that is partially between those who take responsibility for their world and those who take it for granted. Some philosophical battles are won, but this is in part a battle of attitude – which can be enabled or encouraged by articulations of thinkers, to be sure (and I hope to join you in this fight), but the battle is never fully won.
The difficulty I mean to emphasize is that the slide from individual to individuality is one of morale and not just ideology or analysis.
September 19th, 2009 | 1:23 pm
Human dignity is character and conscience. “Moral good is objective and a properly formed conscience can perceive it.” (JPII)
From there leads a path of conceptual clarity illuminated by ethical clarity.
Rights, for instance, are understood as just claims (claims that are just), starting with the analytically secure right to one’s own life (This life I am living is my own; I am the one thinking these thoughts). In community with others, through the special form of intuition we call empathy, we recognize these rights as belonging to everyone and as transcendently valid before (unborn and young) persons “come to” them and after aging persons “pass from” them.
Therein the foundations of human dignity that can be known this side of the mystery of our lives.
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