ABSTRACT
Concluding its 2002 report entitled Beyond Therapy, the President’s Council on Bioethics, which was first organized in response to “advances in biomedical science and technology” by the executive order from President Bush in 2001, returns to the fundamental question of how to define the human being in this age of biotechnology:
Going “beyond therapy” … is to see the human being as a creature “inbetween,” neither god nor beast, neither dump body nor disembodied soul, but as a puzzling, upward-pointing unity of psyche and soma whose precise limitations are the source of its-our-loftiest aspirations, whose weaknesses are the source of its-our-keenest attachments, and whose natural gifts may be, if we do not squander or destroy them, exactly what we need to flourish and perfect ourselves-as human beings. Readers, we hope, will recognize that this entire report has been written from this more-than-therapeutic perspective and with this richly humanistic intent. (347-8)
The Council’s candid remark on the “in-between”-ness of the human being would surprise many, including Van Helsing who, as we have observed in the previous chapter on Dracula, has struggled to prevent the hybridity of the human from being exposed. The remark could also make uneasy those believing in human dignity, as it acknowledges the uncanny truth about science, one that “ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light”: the human is as much an agent as an object of scientific research, experimentation and manipulation. Of course, it is highly doubtful that the remark is intended to disparage human dignity; on the contrary, it denotes the Council’s ultimate project to develop a new definition of the human being, according to which humans, though somatic in nature, possess “psychic and moral and spiritual” capacities that are so resilient and robust as to survive the materialistic reductionism of biotechnology in particular and science in general. Accordingly, the ensuing work of the Council has largely focused on collecting these capacities, as can be verified in its 2008 report, Human Dignity and Bioethics, where collective essays discuss what constitute human dignity and how it has been developed in our society. Adam Schulman for instance enumerates the four “tangled sources of human dignity”—Classical antiquity, Biblical religion, Kantian moral philosophy, and twentieth-century constitutions and international declarations-and argues that we should “take a stand on the meaning of human dignity, understood as the essential and inviolable core of our humanity.”
