The Magazine

The Human Factor

Understanding man's place in the ethical universe.

Dec 21, 2009, Vol. 15, No. 14 • By DAWN EDEN
Single Page Print Larger Text Smaller Text Alerts

Neither Beast Nor God

The Dignity of the Human Person

by Gilbert Meilaender

Encounter, 180 pp., $21.95

Last June, in perhaps his least surprising move since entering the White House, President Obama disbanded his predecessor's Council on Bioethics. Throughout his campaign, Obama had derided George W. Bush's ethical concerns as a "war on science." Once he delivered his Inaugural Address--with its promise to "restore science to its rightful place and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality"--it was clear that President Bush's panel of experts were about as welcome as elbow patches on an Armani suit.

And so, when the order came down for the council's bioethicists to haul away their proverbial cardboard boxes, Gilbert Meilaender, who had served on the council since its inception, was prepared. He did the logical next thing, the academic equivalent of going to Walt Disney World: He wrote a book. In his preface to Neither Beast Nor God, Meilaender, a Lutheran who chairs the department of Christian Ethics at Valparaiso University, writes that the book "began to form itself" in his mind as he "puzzled over questions that arose" in the council. (Oddly, he doesn't mention that it is essentially a book-length expansion of his 2007 New Atlantis article "Human Dignity and Public Bioethics.") He wishes "to distinguish especially two different senses" with regard to appeals to dignity--"human dignity and personal dignity."

To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber

We're Sorry,

the rest of this article is available only to subscribers.

You have two options:

Subscribing today will provide you with immediate, complete access to the current issue, as well as to all back issues on the site. Each week you will be able to read articles from the newest issue even before print copies are mailed!

Privacy Policy