The Stupidity of Dignity

The New Republic ^ | 5/28/08 | Steven Pinker

[steve-b]

This spring, the President's Council on Bioethics released a 555-page report, titled Human Dignity and Bioethics. The Council, created in 2001 by George W. Bush, is a panel of scholars charged with advising the president and exploring policy issues related to the ethics of biomedical innovation, including drugs that would enhance cognition, genetic manipulation of animals or humans, therapies that could extend the lifespan...

[Leon] Kass frequently makes his case using appeals to "human dignity".... In an essay with the revealing title "L'Chaim and Its Limits, " Kass voiced his frustration that the rabbis he spoke with just couldn't see what was so terrible about technologies that would extend life, health, and fertility. "The desire to prolong youthfulness," he wrote in reply, is "an expression of a childish and narcissistic wish incompatible with devotion to posterity." The years that would be added to other people's lives, he judged, were not worth living: "Would professional tennis players really enjoy playing 25 percent more games of tennis?" And, as empirical evidence that "mortality makes life matter," he notes that the Greek gods lived "shallow and frivolous lives"--an example of his disconcerting habit of treating fiction as fact....

Kass has a problem not just with longevity and health but with the modern conception of freedom.....

Worst of all, theocon bioethics flaunts a callousness toward the billions of non-geriatric people, born and unborn, whose lives or health could be saved by biomedical advances. Even if progress were delayed a mere decade by moratoria, red tape, and funding taboos (to say nothing of the threat of criminal prosecution), millions of people with degenerative diseases and failing organs would needlessly suffer and die. And that would be the biggest affront to human dignity of all.

[RightWhale]

What is ‘human dignity’? Must be some other kind of dignity besides this if we must qualify this dignity as human, so what is dignity when other than humann?

[steve-b]

Even if progress were delayed a mere decade by moratoria, red tape, and funding taboos (to say nothing of the threat of criminal prosecution), millions of people with degenerative diseases and failing organs would needlessly suffer and die.

This is why I consider having anything to do with a crackpot like Kass to be one of Dubya's great failings, right up there with his failure to secure the borders. If the influence of that nut fringe delays major breakthroughs in life extension or the like by so much as a decade, they'll have so much blood on their hands that, compared to them, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin will be a couple of naughty little boys who should be slapped soundly upon the wrists and sent off to bed without dessert.

[PA Engineer]

[Leon] Kass frequently makes his case using appeals to "human dignity".... In an essay with the revealing title "L'Chaim and Its Limits, " Kass voiced his frustration that the rabbis he spoke with just couldn't see what was so terrible about technologies that would extend life, health, and fertility.

All disease should be treated to improve the quality of life. When will morons like Kass realize that aging should be treated as a disease?