First Things: The Politics of Bioethics

An excerpt (subscription) from Richard John Neuhaus's article on "The Politics of Bioethics" in the November issue of First Things where he discusses the concept of "human dignity" [italics his; boldface mine]:

. . . In general, our political life is not heavily burdened by theory, or at least not by the explication of theory. That is because knowing and judging the good things of human life is not so burdened.

In the realm of bioethics, however, and specifically with respect to the dignity of the human person, such explication is sometimes required. An obvious example is abortion and the many issues inseparably tied to abortion. The most consequential political event of the past half-century in the United States was the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions of January 1973. Numerous political analysts have described how those decisions have dramatically reconfigured the nation’s cultural and political life. And, of course, those decisions are intimately tied to many other hot-button issues in bioethics. As an act of “raw judicial power” (as Justice Byron White called it in his dissent), Roe removed a preeminently political, which is to say moral, question from public deliberation. The abortion decisions were a profoundly anti-political act and are accurately described as instances of the judicial usurpation of politics. By attempting to remove the question from public debate, the Court turned it into something very much like the vortex of American politics.

The moral question is not, as the court majority claimed, about when a human life begins. That is a biological and medical question on which there is no serious dispute. The moral question can be put this way: At what point in its existence ought we, and for what reasons ought we, to recognize that a human life should be protected in law?

On this issue, if no other, Peter Singer has it right. As the noted Princeton advocate of infanticide said in a June 20, 2005, letter to the New York Times rebuking Mario Cuomo for his confused thinking about abortion: “The crucial moral question is not when human life begins, but when human life reaches the point at which it merits protection. . . . Unless we separate these two questions—when does life begin, and when does it merit protection?—we are unlikely to achieve any clarity about the moral status of embryos.”

That moral question is also and unavoidably a political question. One might make the case that it is the most fundamental of political questions. If politics is deliberating how we ought to order our life together, there can hardly be a more basic question than this: Who belongs to the we? Although ostensibly removing it from politics, the abortion decisions forced into the political arena an issue that was thought to have been settled in the centuries of civilizational tradition of which our polity is part. Namely, that it is morally wrong and rightly made unlawful to deliberately kill unborn children.

If a principle is established by which some indisputably human lives do not warrant the protections traditionally associated with the dignity of the human person—because of their size, location, dependency, level of development, or burdensomeness to others—it would seem that there are numerous candidates for the application of the principle, beginning with the radically handicapped, both physically and mentally, not to mention millions of the aged and severely debilitated in our nation’s nursing homes.

It may be objected that of course we as a people are not about to embark on such a program of extermination. To think we might do so is simply bizarre. And as a culturally and politically contingent fact, that is true. But under the regime of Roe, a regime extended to embryonic stem cell research and other bioethical controversies, we have no “clear and unambiguous” agreed-on rule precluding such horrors. We do have in our constituting texts, notably in the Declaration of Independence, a commitment to natural rights, and we do have deeply entrenched in our culture and politics a concept of the dignity of the human person.

The question, then, is, Who belongs to the community for which we as a community accept responsibility, including the responsibility to protect, along with other natural rights, their right to life? This is a preeminently political question. It is not a question to be decided by bioethicists. Bioethicists, by virtue of their disciplined attention to such questions, are in a position to help inform political deliberations and decisions about these matters, but these questions are— rightly and of necessity—to be decided politically. They are rightly so decided because our constitutional order vests political sovereignty in the people, who exercise that sovereignty through prescribed means of representation. They are of necessity so decided because in this society the views of moral philosophers—whether trained as such in the academy or acting as such on the bench—are not deemed to be determinative. Witness the democratic non-ratification of the Supreme Court’s imposition of the unlimited abortion license.

To say that such decisions are rightly decided politically is not to say that the resulting decisions will always be morally right. Those who disagree with the decisions that are made must make their case in the political arena. . .

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