Kant's antipode: Nietzche's transvaluation of human dignity and its "implications" for biotechnology policy.

• Author: Murdoch, C.J.

"What alone can be our doctrine? That no one gives a human being his qualities." (1) The idea that the development, control or use of a biotechnology either threatens or violates human dignity is frequently harnessed as an argument for strict regulation or total prohibition on materials or practices in the biotechnology sector. (2) Recent analysis has shown that the conception of human dignity which is marshalled here is out-of-step with traditional conceptions of human dignity as elucidated in the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (3) Instead, it serves as something of a hollow rhetorical trope, a powerful indictment and conversation stopper which pre-emptively casts the ethical stone in hopes of striking the mouth of the opponent and silencing her. (4) The analysis which unmasks dignity-rhetoric, however, often takes for granted that the U.N. idea of human dignity is the "true" or at least a preferable conception. (5) This idea was inherited from Kant, who held that human dignity is inherent and derives from our status as finite rational beings capable of autonomous action, (6) and the Kantian notion was itself anticipated in Christian ideas of individual ethical responsibility and worth under God. (7) However, although this conception has dominated the public debate, it is only one among a myriad of understandings of what constitutes human dignity. In this paper, we take up the challenge posed by Caulfield and Chapman to explore the multiplicity of models for human dignity, (8) beginning with a rewardingly difficult example of how different these understandings can be: the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche.

For Nietzsche, Kant's ideas hold little sway. Instead, the "stiff and decorous Tartuffery of the old Kant as he lures us on the dialectical bypaths that lead to his 'categorical imperative'--really lead[s] astray and seduce[s]." (9) The gulf between the ideas of Nietzsche and Kant is variously enormous and negligible, and although there is not space here for an exhaustive exploration of this interplay, consideration of their contrasting views of humanity is instructive. For Kant, human beings all have intrinsic worth as ends in themselves due to their status as moral agents--or, in metaphysical rather than ethical terms, due to their autonomy. (10) The traditional human-rights perspective as articulated by Caulfield and Brownsword (11) modulates the Kantian view and sees the right to self-determination as flowing from the...