On Human Dignity
Meilaender on bearing up under burdens
I’m on my final spring tour of speaking engagements before it becomes illegal to fly in a few weeks. (Just for me, on account of pregnancy, don’t worry, you’re all still allowed). I was in Oklahoma to talk about the dignity of dependence two weeks ago, moderated a debate on medical aid in dying at Stanford this week, and, next week, I make my final pre-baby trip to South Carolina, to be part of a panel on Catholic Political Thought in America at Furman University.
While I work on catching my breath (especially because someone is sitting right under my lungs), I wanted to share a brief excerpt from my recent reading.
When I packed my bag for the Medical Aid in Dying debate, I made sure to bring both my gavel and the copy of Gilbert Meilaender’s Neither Beast Nor God: The Dignity of the Human Person that’s been on my to-read shelf.
Meilaender wrote an essay on how to die for First Things in 2010 starkly titled, “I Want to Burden My Loved Ones.” The MAiD advocate in the debate tended to focus her arguments on the brutality of pain, but, increasingly, those seeking lethal drugs cite their fear of burdening others. Meilaender wrote:
It is, therefore, understandable that we sometimes chafe under these burdens. If, however, we also go on to reject them, we cease to live in the kind of moral community that deserves to be called a family. Here more than in any other sphere of life we are presented with unwanted and unexpected interruptions to our plans and projects. I do not like such interruptions any more than the next person; indeed, a little less, I rather suspect. But it is still true that morality consists in large part in learning to deal with the unwanted and unexpected interruptions to our plans. I have tried, subject to my limits and weaknesses, to teach that lesson to my children. Perhaps I will teach it best when I am a burden to them in my dying.
I’m only partway into his short book, but here’s a passage that I dog-eared early on:
We have, then, two concepts of dignity—human and personal—that invite our reflection. Human dignity has to do with the powers and the limits characteristic of our species— a species marked by the integrated functioning of body and spirit. We may differ, individually, in the way or the degree to which we manifest those characteristics and that distinctively human wholeness, but the specific dignity of the human species would be diminished or lost if we were utterly to transcend the limits of our bodies (and become something more like a god) or if we were to think of our bodies not as the place of personal presence but (as for beasts) things to be manipulated for purposes entirely external to them. The first of these ways of subverting our human dignity has been called, in our moral tradition, pride; the second sloth.
Personal dignity, by contrast, has to do not with species—specific powers and limits but with the individual person, whose dignity calls for our respect whatever his or her powers and limits may be. It is closely tied to our affirmation of human equality. Each concept is needed and merits our attention, but it is personal dignity that provides a cantus firmus underlying and sustaining the whole.
I really appreciate this distinction, especially as we seek to find a way to protect human beings with congenital challenges from being pushed out of the human family while still acknowledging something good about the typical conjunction of human capacities.
It reminds me a little of some discussions of male and female infertility, which are not the same privation. There’s a bit in the writings of Sheldon Vanauken, where he shares some of his correspondence with C.S. Lewis.
The Vanaukens (whose story of love, marriage, and conversion is movingly told in A Severe Mercy) wanted to be absolute equals in their marriage, so chose to avoid children, which would differentiate them too much as mother-father, not lover-lover. Later, Lewis rebukes this idea in a letter to his friend as wrongheaded morally and practically:
The idea behind your voluntary sterility, that an experience, e.g. maternity, wh. cannot be shared shd. on that account be avoided, is surely v. unsound. […] The experience of a woman denied maternity is one you did not & could not share with her. To be denied paternity is different.
I’m looking forward to reading on in Meilaender. Thinking about the human and personal dignities he neatly describes, I’m thinking about the way we are shaped by privation as well as by capacity. The privation of a capacity is still a shadow-testament to how we are made.
When my patients tell me they don’t want to be a burden, I observe they themselves are bearing many burdens: their suffering, their losses, their frustrations, other things. Those things are burdens. But they don’t become a burden by bearing them. These burdens are too much for any one person to bear. Most have a choice to share those burdens with others. This is, as Meilaender observes, how others can love them.
I confess I am inclined to see Lewis as paternalistic, here. I’m angered, a little, by the attitude that men are competent to determine for a women what her ideal path in life ought to be, and to pity her when she deviates from it.
Your broader point that women might generally experience infertility in a different way to men is worth mulling on, but only if it is not to be applied in such a way as to collapse all women into a narrow mould.