The Stupidity of Dignity

Steven Pinker dis­misses dig­nity as a basis for bioethics dis­cus­sions in bio­med­ical research, which US con­ser­v­a­tives and reli­gious lead­ers are invok­ing to dis­miss poten­tially life-saving med­ical advances. Unfor­tu­nately “over­ween­ing hubris” char­ac­ter­izes most for­mal dis­cus­sions of real revolutions:

In every age, prophets fore­see dystopias that never mate­ri­al­ize, while fail­ing to antic­i­pate the real rev­o­lu­tions. Had there been a President’s Coun­cil on Cyberethics in the 1960s, no doubt it would have decried the threat of the Inter­net, since it would inex­orably lead to 1984, or to com­put­ers “tak­ing over” like HAL in 2001. Con­ser­v­a­tive bioethi­cists pre­sume to sooth­say the out­come of the quin­tes­sen­tially unpre­dictable endeavor called sci­en­tific research. And they would stage-manage the kinds of social change that, in a free soci­ety, only emerge as hun­dreds of mil­lions of peo­ple weigh the costs and ben­e­fits of new devel­op­ments for them­selves, adjust­ing their mores and deal­ing with spe­cific harms as they arise, as they did with in vitro fer­til­iza­tion and the Internet.