Centerfield

Dignity More Important Than Death?

That's what the President's Bioethics Council effectively says. A few years ago, there were rightie-centrist-side grumbles about the Bioethics Council. Instapundit has been unhappy for awhile.

I'd go beyond Pinker on this with respect to VOLUNTARY lack of dignity - can you think of any great things any of us have ever accomplished without losing dignity? Imagine if our Revolutionary generation had decided dignity was more important than rebelling against the UK. The Continental Congress would've been full of speeches on not being ready to live with year after year of scampering from British armies, and we'd still be British subjects. No, the Bioethics Council can keep its precious dignity.

Of course, involuntary loss of dignity, like boarding a plane or being tortured, or having panties stuck on Iraqi prisoners' heads, is a different matter.

Of course, if anybody on the President's Bioethics Council had ever done anything important, this might be more obvious to them.

Gina Dalfonzo of The Point actually defends the Bioethics Council:

Pinker tries to persuade us, with some silly and weightless examples, just how impossible it is to determine the true meaning of dignity, to set up his contention that "dignity is a phenomenon of human perception."

Ms Dalfonso really sees nothing in the comparison between Kass' standards of dignity and the majority public-ice-cream-lovers? I mean, what's so hard to see about it?

That, no doubt, is why he can't see why members of the President's Council consider such practices as embryonic stem-cell research and "therapeutic cloning" an affront to human dignity. If other humans declare that using embryonic humans for their own ends is okay according to their own notions of human dignity, where's the problem?

I declare that using embryos to save children from nasty and fatal genetic diseases via preimplantation genetic diagnosis and IVF is OK. That's because I'm pro-LIFE. Those childrens' lives matter more than embryos do. Embros are only a faint potential of human life; the childrens' lives are the real thing, right now. Would you rather see human corpses than dead embryos? Dignity has nothing to do with it.