Leon R. Kass, M.D., of AEI and the University of Chicago, delivered the sixth of the 2006–2007 Bradley Lectures on February 5. Edited excerpts follow. A video and full transcript of the lecture is available at www.aei.org/event1376/.

Hertog Fellow Leon R. Kass

Let me suggest three aspects of the relationship between the basic dignity of human being and the full dignity of being flourishingly human: mutual dependence, the ground of human aspiration, and intimations of transcendence.

First, the dignity of human being and the dignity of being human are mutually interdependent. The flourishing of human possibility depends on active human vitality--that is, on the goodness and worth of life as such. The humanly high depends for its very existence on the humanly low, on the mere existence and well-working of the enlivened human body.

As a consequence, just as the higher human powers and activities depend upon the lower for their existence, so the lower depend on the higher for their standing; they gain their worth
or dignity mainly by virtue of being integrated with the higher--because the nature of the being is human. What I have been calling the basic dignity of human being--sometimes expressed as the “sanctity of human life” or the “respect owed to human life” as such--in fact depends on the higher dignity of being human.

This mutual dependence can be clearly illuminated if we ask why murder is wrong, why all civilized people hold innocent life to be inviolable. A clue is provided by a philosophical reading of the biblical Noahic code in Genesis, which, after the Flood, founds a new world order based on the respect for human life and expressed in the announcement of the punishment for homicide: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.”

By equating a life for a life (and no more than a life for a life), the threatened punishment implicitly teaches the equal worth of each human life. Such equality can be grounded only in the equal humanity of each human being. Against our tendency to overvalue what is our own, blood-for-blood conveys the message of universality and equality.

The fundamental reason that murder is wrong is man’s divine-like status. The human being has special dignity because he shares in the godlike powers of reason, freedom, judgment, and moral concern, and therefore lives a life freighted with moral self-consciousness above the plane of a merely animal existence. Speech and freedom are used, among other things, to promulgate moral rules and to pass moral judgments--the first among which is that homicide is to be punished in kind because it violates the dignity of such a moral being. The inviolability of human life rests on the higher, godlike dignity of human beings. But respecting human godlikeness also requires respecting human blood, “which is the life”; it requires respecting human being as such.

The dignity of being human depends not only for its existence on the presence and worth of human vitality; our dignity’s full realization in admirable human activity depends for its active pursuit and attainment--the second aspect of their relationship--on human aspiration.

Everything humanly high gets its energizing aspiration from what is humanly low. Necessity is not only the mother of invention; it is also the mother of excellence, love, and the ties that bind and enrich human life. Human life is lived always with and against necessity, struggling to meet and elevate it, not to eliminate it. Like the downward pull of gravity without which the dancer cannot dance, the downward pull of bodily necessity and fate makes possible the dignified journey of a truly human life. It is a life that will use our awareness of need, limitation, and mortality to craft a way of being that has engagement, depth, beauty, virtue, and meaning--not despite our embodiment but because of it. Human aspiration depends absolutely on our being creatures of need and finitude, of longings and attachments.

This discovery gives rise to what might seem to be a paradox: human dignity is ours in part because of our “animality,” because we are not incorporeal minds, angels, or gods. Indeed, once again it is our in-between status--at once godlike and animal--that is the deep truth about our nature, the ground of our special standing, and the wherewithal of our flourishing.

Aspiration is the mother of all aspects of the dignity of being human. Though born of our frailty and bodily neediness, this dignity is sired also by a divine spark which Being has miraculously prepared the human animal to recognize and pursue. This transcendent possibility is the third aspect of the relationship between what is humanly low and what is humanly high; indeed, it is a possibility that points us to what is highest.

The dignity of being human, rooted in the dignity of life itself and flourishing in a manner seemingly issuing only in human pride, completes itself and stands tallest when we bow our heads and lift our hearts in recognition of powers greater than our own. The fullest dignity of the godlike animal is realized in its acknowledgment and celebration of the divine.