Why Bioethics Cannot Survive Without a True Vision of the Human Person
One of the strangest features of contemporary Western culture is that we speak constantly about dignity while often being deeply uncertain about who possesses it. Our public language is full of appeals to human rights, equality, non-discrimination, inclusion, and respect. These words dominate politics, medicine, law, education, and international declarations. Few societies have ever spoken so much about the dignity of the human person.
And yet, at the very same time, we routinely deny protection to whole classes of vulnerable human beings: the unborn child, the embryo in the laboratory, the severely disabled infant, the elderly person with advanced dementia, the patient in a persistent vegetative state, the suffering person tempted by assisted suicide. We insist that dignity is universal, but then quietly redefine the conditions for belonging to the circle of those who are fully protected.
This is the contradiction Charles C. Camosy addresses in Losing Our Dignity. His argument is not simply that modern bioethics reaches bad conclusions on abortion, euthanasia, disability, and end-of-life care. His deeper claim is that modern bioethics has suffered an anthropological collapse. It has detached dignity from what the human being is and attached it instead to what the human being can do.
The Fragile Language of Equality
Camosy’s argument is that contemporary bioethics did not simply make a few mistaken policy judgments. It inherited the language of dignity and equality while losing the anthropology that once made such language coherent. Modern liberal culture still wants to say that every human being has equal dignity. It still wants to condemn discrimination. It still wants to protect the weak from arbitrary violence. It still wants to speak the language of universal rights.
Here Camosy’s diagnosis can be deepened by Mary Ann Glendon and Alasdair MacIntyre. As Glendon argued in Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse, rights language becomes distorted when it is severed from duties, responsibilities, communities, and the moral habits that sustain a humane society. A culture can speak endlessly about rights while forgetting the obligations that make rights intelligible and the virtues that make them livable.
MacIntyre makes a related point in After Virtue: modern moral discourse often consists of fragments of older traditions, detached from the larger account of human nature, virtue, and the good life that once gave those fragments coherence. We still use words such as dignity, justice, equality, autonomy, and compassion, but we often lack a shared understanding of what man is and what he is for. The result is a culture that can affirm equality morally while denying it ontologically.
This is why the modern language of equality is so fragile. It speaks as though dignity were universal, but it often lacks the metaphysical foundation needed to defend that claim. Here Gustave Thibon is especially helpful. In What Ails Mankind?, his criticism of socialism and false egalitarianism is not merely political. It is anthropological. He sees that modern egalitarianism often begins with a Christian intuition—the equal worth of persons—but then detaches that intuition from the created order, from hierarchy, from concrete bonds, and from God. Once equality is severed from reality, it does not produce communion. It produces abstraction, envy, resentment, and the leveling of persons according to ideological categories.
Christian equality does not mean that all persons possess the same capacities, roles, gifts, intelligence, health, strength, or social function. It means that every human being possesses the same fundamental dignity before God. False egalitarianism, by contrast, tries to erase real differences while quietly introducing new and more dangerous inequalities. It abolishes visible hierarchies only to replace them with hidden ones: the powerful over the weak, the functional over the dependent, the autonomous over the voiceless, the expert over the vulnerable.
This is why the modern language of equality can so easily become gnostic. Emanuele Samek Lodovici saw this clearly in Metamorfosi della gnosi: Quadri della dissoluzione contemporanea. Modern gnosis is not merely an old religious heresy revived in antiquarian form. It is a recurring temptation of the human spirit: hostility toward the given human condition, impatience with finitude, and the dream of remaking man and society according to an ideological image.
This gnostic impulse refuses the limits and givenness of created reality. It dreams of a humanity liberated from nature, dependence, hierarchy, sex, family, suffering, and even death. It promises redemption through knowledge, technique, political reconstruction, or cultural revolution. Yet when equality is no longer grounded in the truth of the human person as created by God, it becomes unstable. It may proclaim universal dignity in theory, while excluding in practice those who do not fit the desired image of autonomous, productive, self-defining man.
This returns us to Camosy’s central concern. If every human being has equal dignity, then that dignity must be rooted in something every human being equally possesses. It cannot be rooted in intelligence, independence, productivity, consciousness, autonomy, or social usefulness, because these qualities are not equally possessed. They differ from person to person. They can increase or decrease. They can be lost through injury, illness, age, or disability.
If dignity depends on autonomy, then the dependent have less dignity. If dignity depends on consciousness, then the unconscious have less dignity. If dignity depends on rational performance, then those with cognitive impairment have less dignity. If dignity depends on being wanted, then the unwanted have less dignity.
This is why the unborn child, the disabled infant, the dependent elderly person, the patient with dementia, and the dying person become so vulnerable in modern bioethics. They reveal the scandal of creatureliness. They remind us that man is not self-created, self-sufficient, or infinitely malleable. A genuinely Christian anthropology does not seek salvation by escaping the human condition, but by receiving it as created, wounded, redeemed, and destined for glory.
This is why modern culture can affirm equality morally while denying it ontologically, basing that denial on accidental differences. It speaks beautifully about rights, equality, and dignity, but forgets the duties, virtues, communities, and metaphysical foundation that make such language meaningful. It says all persons are equal, but then defines “person” in a way that excludes some human beings. We are equal as persons, not as bundles of capacities. Our dignity and rights are metaphysical, not functional. They are rooted in what the human being is, not in what the human being can presently do.
The Person–Human Being Distinction
This is where the abstract crisis of equality becomes concrete in bioethics. At the heart of much contemporary bioethics lies a dangerous distinction between “human beings” and “persons.” A human being, in this framework, is simply a biological member of the species Homo sapiens. A person, by contrast, is said to be someone who possesses certain psychological or cognitive capacities: self-awareness, rationality, autonomy, consciousness, the ability to form preferences, or the ability to participate in relationships in a recognizable way. Peter Singer expresses this distinction with characteristic bluntness in the third edition of Practical Ethics, especially in chapters 4 through 7, where he argues that membership in the species Homo sapiens does not by itself confer the moral status associated with personhood. On this view, beings with rationality, self-awareness, and future-oriented preferences have a stronger claim than beings who lack these capacities. The result is that some nonhuman animals may be treated as “persons,” while some human beings—including infants or those with profound cognitive disabilities—may not.
At first, this may sound sophisticated. It seems to allow ethicists to distinguish between mere biological life and the fully developed moral subject. But the consequences are devastating. If not every human being is a person, then not every human being has equal moral worth. Some human beings may be treated as non-persons, partial persons, potential persons, or former persons. This is why embryos can be destroyed for research, unborn children can be eliminated through abortion, infants with disabilities can be treated as lives of diminished value, and patients with advanced dementia can be spoken of as though the person has disappeared while the body remains.
Camosy’s critique is powerful because he sees that this is not merely a problem of policy. It is a problem of anthropology. Once dignity is tied to function, dignity becomes conditional. Once dignity becomes conditional, equality becomes incoherent. This is one of the ironies of modernity. We cannot stop speaking about dignity, and yet we increasingly lack the metaphysical ground necessary to protect it. Something of this ambiguity can already be seen, in seed form, in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s famous Oration on the Dignity of Man. Pico did not simply deny the Christian tradition, but he helped shift the accent. Human dignity begins to be described less in terms of man’s creation in the image of God and more in terms of man’s indeterminacy, freedom, and capacity for self-fashioning.
The irony is striking. We move from Pico’s emphasis on man’s dignity qua man—dignity because he is man—in a work that was, in its own time, viewed with deep suspicion precisely because it seemed to separate man’s dignity from his relation to God as imago Dei. Four hundred years later, we find that man is losing the very dignity modernity claimed to exalt. Once dignity is detached from God, it must be grounded elsewhere: in freedom, autonomy, self-expression, power, or self-fashioning. But these foundations cannot bear the weight.
This logic reaches a new intensity in transhumanism and posthumanism. It is not only that the likeness of God is obscured when man is detached from grace; now even the givenness of human nature itself becomes unstable. Nick Bostrom, one of the leading defenders of transhumanism, makes clear that the goal is not merely therapeutic healing, but the possibility of moving beyond present human limits toward a posthuman condition. Man is no longer received as a creature whose nature is to be perfected by grace, virtue, and communion with God. He becomes a project to be modified, surpassed, or replaced.
This is why the modern exaltation of dignity eventually makes dignity fragile. If dignity is attached chiefly to freedom, autonomy, self-creation, or self-expression, then those who cannot exercise these powers become vulnerable. We continue to speak about dignity, but we no longer know how to defend it when consciousness fades, autonomy disappears, or dependence becomes total. Dignity needs to be anchored in something more stable than human capacity. It must be rooted in God.
The Christian vision is different. The human being does not become dignified by achieving consciousness, autonomy, productivity, self-expression, or technological enhancement. The human being possesses dignity because he or she is created in the image of God. Dignity is not an award for successful performance. It is not a social recognition granted by the strong to the weak. It is not a legal fiction. It is rooted in the very being of the human person as created, loved, and called by God.
Editor’s Note: This article is part of a CE original series on Bioethics & Culture by Fr. Francesco Giordano, tackling the challenging moral issues of our day.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
