Who Decides what Human Dignity Really Is?

I’ve been mulling the recent papal announcement that the death penalty is, like abortion, a danger to the dignity of human personhood so great as to forbid its moral justification. 

The announcement should remind us that from a Catholic perspective the forbidding of abortion isn’t rooted in a scientific decision about when a human life is viable. It is a moral decision about how to protect the dignity of humanity against the encroachments of a-moral social and/or scientific reasoning. Discussions of viability merely beg the question of who defines “viable,” with disastrous consequences for any person who doesn’t meet some socially constructed definition of being truly human.

Likewise insisting on the human dignity of the worst or most dangerous of humans, those sentenced to death, isn’t a question of whose life or death would make society a safer or better place. Merely seeking distinguish the lesser human, like trying to identify the “viable” human, inevitably leads to the kind of inhuman conclusions that filled the gas chambers of the Third Reich, the gulags of Stalin and the killing fields of Pol Pot. 

At the same time an argument over maintaining the dignity of humanity hardly solves the ethical problems raised by the conception of a child in circumstances that will result in its certain death within the womb, or which drastically reduce the dignity, and even safety, of the life of the mother. Nor does it resolve the problem of how to protect public safety and do justice to those whose lives have been irrevocably damaged by evil. 

The problems that remain after the prohibitions, whether of abortion or the death penalty remind us that the greatest guarantor and adornment of human dignity isn’t mere life. It is freedom, in particular the essentially political freedoms articulated in the US Constitution and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There are regimes that both prohibit abortion and the death penalty, but whose daily oppressions of their citizens are far more an affront to human dignity than all the abortion clinics and death rows put together. 

But it isn’t just modern nation states and their state-like counterparts that endanger human dignity. As near daily revelations remind us, the Christian church is also a human institution that will sacrifice human dignity for the perpetuation of its own reputation and power. Were it not for a free press and human courts in a democratic society we can be assured that scandalous sexual abuse of children in the last century would never have come to light, much less to justice. And one need not look far to find Christian churches supporting vile dictators and oppressive regimes so long as their institutional prerogatives are respected.

Yet this isn’t simply a matter of corrupt institutions which may be (and thankfully sometimes are) reformed. At the root there is the question of what constitutes the God-given dignity of a human being. Does it subsist in submission to God’s will through the discipline of the Church? Or does it subsist in submission to the judgment of one’s peers in a free and democratic society. 

Of course some Christians have tried to combine the two, making the church the democratic institution it should be. But even within ecclesial democracies both constitutional norms and the normal course of politics have privileged theological elites, the entrenched ecclesial power centers, and those with a surfeit of money and want of scruples necessary to play power politics. 

This only underscores the question raised by Catholic teaching: who determines just what constitutes human dignity: the representatives of God, however chosen, or free humans who claim no more than to represent themselves?

Even now, when the Catholic Church shows unprecedented moral leadership, and even in a time when our secular democratic institutions show unprecedented moral degradation, When it comes to public morality enacted in law I would choose as defenders of human dignity those who honestly claim to represent only their human constituents over those who put forward a claim to speak for God. An imperfect democracy still counts every human voice, and therefore every forum in which God speaks. It thus hears far more of God’s counsel on how our societies should be formed than all the theologians, prelates, priests, and pastors who ever lived.