Dignity vs. Neediness in the Bioethics War

Star intellectual Steven Pinker, who should be careful whom he calls stupid, has penned (for The New Republic) an attack on the President’s Council on Bioethics that makes my ridicule of Martha Nussbaum sound like a call-in to Delilah. It is so easy to think up a list of insults for this piece that I will save them for print publication and refer you to Yuval Levin’s searing retort at National Review. But it is impossible not to throw in my two cents, and it might even be worth doing so.

First I should be clear that I know and like several people who are affiliated with the President’s Council, at least some of whom reciprocate. Second, in the interests of full disclosure, I study political theory, one of Pinker’s most unfavorite non-sciences, at one of Pinker’s most reviled medieval dungeons — Georgetown University, a dank Papist redoubt in which I was repeatedly ‘put to the question’ as a first-year PhD student until I became the Zombie of Rome I am today.

That said, Yuval’s defense of the Council does a suitable job of cutting Pinker down to size, but a bit more could be done to hone in on the source of Pinker’s great ire. There are lots of little Pinkers running around out there, and as nice as it’d be to conduct a dignified conversation about dignity without any interference, simply laughing Pinker offstage is not likely to get the job done. No, fans of an openended bioethical future uninformed by religious worry will have to be persuaded that Pinker has jumped his shark and ours. Or at least I think I’ll have to help try.

Thus I’m somewhat pessimistic about concerning them on the basis of a conversation about human dignity. Pinker is right that dignity is a notoriously slippery concept; he hints at but neglects to admit that human dignity in the hands of someone like Nussbaum admits of all manner of new bioethical duties, like finding suffering strangers all around the world and making them into our political, philosophical, economic, and oh yes medical patients. Whereas the Council worries nobly about too little dignity, I worry (from an at least arguably noble position) about a glut of dignity, dignitomania, a cultural Wal-Mart of dignities, dignity on demand — a social system in which taking all claims to dignity at face value will result in absurdity, which always results from an enforced obsession with egalitarianism.

Demanding dignity, in short, can be its own special kind of undignified behavior, too. Since the Council is concerned with other issues — a pretty short list of possible human dignities that biomedicine might erase or render meaningless — I can’t fault its members for puzzling over dignity and thinking it through. That’s a worthwhile process, because if there’s one thing worse than indignity it’s undignity, a cognitive and moral void where there should be shared and individual judgments about what and who is dignified and why. Nonetheless, in the current culture dignity talk gives us a constitutional right to have one’s living arrangements recognized officially by the state as not just marriages but families. And whatever you think about that, it’s easy to see how discourses of dignity nowadays seem point us toward the same ‘progressive’ bioethics that the Council is so worried about. So I’m all for arguing about dignity on academic terms, but in order to win over the ordinary people who incline toward Pinker’s position, something else, some other discourse, is needed.

In fact, I think a promising language to speak is a discourse of neediness. Everyone wants their dignity recognized today but nobody wants to be recognized as needy. ‘Needy’ has virtually lost its quaint old meaning of ‘poor’, and today describes someone who’s inappropriately immature, egotistical, demanding, clingy, an emotional basketcase, a puzzle that doesn’t really want to be solved, a lapdog that bites if you push it off your lap. ‘Needy’ expresses one of the few of our value judgments that flirts with outright cruelty. It rejects the legitimacy of the claimant’s right to surcease of suffering. The claimant is encouraged, if anything, to take a chill pill. Neediness is a date-killer, a relationship-ender, a warning sign, an insult.

Consider in that light the crescendo of Pinker’s diatribe:

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.

Put aside for a moment the complexities introduced into this putatively pro-unborn position by, say, radical life extension. I want to focus on that word “needlessly.” It’s an old saw that, in modern times, today’s wants become tomorrow’s needs. After belaboring the unattractive relativity of dignity discourse, Pinker hangs his whole argument on the most relative term of contemporary life — ‘need.’ Yes, we have not yet fully relativized our ‘need’ for water. (Or are we?) Yet a scientist might perfectly well say that the whole point of technology is to eliminate old needs and create new, better ones. See how much better it is to stop ‘needing’ to boil water, or start ‘needing’ to take daily allergy pills? These are improvements.

But I think there is a profound anxiety beneath that progressive confidence. I think regular people in everyday life recognize that we are not really debunking or disproving or conquering old needs while adding new and better ones. We are standing atop an ever-growing and kind of vertiginous and sometimes unstable pile of needs. The greater our needs, the harder we fall. And in our most self-referential world, keyed to an extraordinary sensitivity to our own discomfort and displeasure, our most serious need of all may be the need to relieve us of the pain of being conscious of having so many needs. The better our medical and biological technology gets, the greater number of apparently ‘needless’ instances of death and suffering there are to behold. We face a world of Nancy Kerrigans — plaintive shouters of “Why me?!” — if we cannot give ourselves a reasonable account of why at least some kinds of death and suffering are necessary: that is, why we need them.

What kind of ‘we’ would we mean if that ‘we’ needed at least some kinds of death and suffering? That’s an uncomfortable question, but it has a lot of answers — at the individual level, at the family level, at the political level, as a question of resource allocation and law, and at the international level. These are important — indeed, necessary — questions about the nature of justice and the scope of politics. And we can’t answer them by discussing them together if we turn over our definition of need to the blind progress of science. That doesn’t mean it isn’t sometimes great when science, blindly progressing, turns up cool, convenient, or life-saving improvements for us. It does mean that Pinker’s idea of ‘needless’ suffering is fraught with problems he tries but fails to sweep under the rug.

So go back to ‘neediness’ discourse. I started out by underscoring the pejorative force of the word ‘needy’, and I seemed to endorse that as an ounce of backbone in society today. Then why would I want to talk about how we should consider what type of suffering we ‘need’, whoever we decide ‘we’ are? Because really that means talking about why it is that people who agree with Pinker want technology to be blind. It isn’t because they have a disinterested and fanatical devotion to Free Science. It’s because they want us to become increasingly needy when it comes to mitigating and eliminating suffering, and they think of ‘we’ as the whole human race. These are interesting positions, but they’re not obvious ones, and they’re definitely not clearly practical ones. Why are Pinker and his sympathizers so deeply troubled by suffering? Why does the ‘problem’ of suffering seem to make them suffer so? And not just ‘serious’ suffering — contrary to what Pinker seems to suggest — but suffering as such, along with death as such? Isn’t that position one that at least ought to have to defend itself?

The lame answer seems to be that any philosophy that tolerates suffering and death and recognizes them as integral parts of natural human life is a retrograde superstition tied moronically to the primitive idea that God created us for the purposes of punishment. Certainly I can think up a religion that could hold that position, but just as surely I can make some arguments about why ‘we’ shouldn’t be so needy about maximally and progressively mitigating or eliminating suffering that don’t depend on membership in the International Cabal of Catholic Thought, District of Columbia chapter.

The Council is right not to try to restore a single coherent definition of dignity. But as important as it is to continue to argue academically about the problem of dignity, I think the bioethically worried may have a better shot at engaging and persuading the public at large on the power that comes with limiting our own needs.