ABSTRACT
A recurring theme in the volume thus far has been human dignity – a dignity that is only illusory without moral “first things,” the permanent things. This chapter seeks to illustrate from recent history the social and cultural tragedy of the absence of natural-law thinking about human personhood. It considers the roughly 50-year period – from 1890 until 1940 – in Germany wherein the path toward moral atrocity was prepared for a society. This path was justified and became broadly accepted at both academic and popular levels. The end result of this preparation was the encroachment on ethics of “biological” and material explanations of human life – explanations that, in time, were quickly imbedded in public and political life, resulting in unprecedented levels of moral atrocity. This “function-oriented” strain of thinking, by which social utility trumps questions of human dignity, though perhaps relatively subdued for several generations, would appear to have emerged once more in our own day in full force. But, as always, it is couched in both in “scientific” garb and in euphemistic language (for example, “mercy killing” and “death with dignity”), both of which masquerade its deformed view of human personhood. A society that succumbs to a “material” understanding of human personhood becomes ill-equipped to prevent and respond to moral atrocity, much less protect religious freedom and the “sacred rights of conscience.”
