ABSTRACT
The values that Dieter Birnbacher identifies as constituting the core of human dignity call to mind what A. Gewirth identifies as ‘basic’ rights. If human dignity consists of rights to basic needs, then to conflate protections owed to the human embryo with respect for human dignity will certainly be to weaken the status of basic rights or to unacceptably strengthen the protections owed to the human embryo. While the important thing is not what we call human dignity, but that we discriminate justifiably between the values of different actions and practices, there is a set of considerations relevant to the use of reproductive technologies that Dieter Birnbacher does not attend to that might be said to concern human dignity. To conflate core and extended appeals to human dignity ‘must either lead to an unacceptably weak protection of individual and concrete dignity or to an unacceptably strong protection of generic and abstract dignity’.
