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
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