Julian’s been blogging up a storm lately. I thought this lengthy critique of Leon Kass was particularly interesting:

For various reasons, Kass is at pains to show that our Dignity, whatever it might be, is not reducible to any number of other familiar moral concerns, such as autonomy, experiential well being, equality, and so on. And given the policy positions he wants to defend, it had better not be: If dignity is, after all, largely either a component or a function of autonomy, you will not get very far interfering with people’s private choices in the name of “dignity” except, perhaps, as a means of rendering their choices more fully informed or reflective. And if it has centrally to do with any experiential or mental properties, we will be hard pressed to see how selling one’s organs or fiddling with stem cells can threaten it. But his efforts here remind me a bit of an example Dan Dennett, in a very different context, likes to offer up: The Tuned Deck.

The idea, briefly, is that a certain magician has managed to confound his professional colleagues with a card trick they can’t decipher. They take measures to rule out one method by which he might be forcing someone to choose his preferred card, or learning what it is once chosen, and find he can still do the trick. They go ahead and do this for every method they know, yet still he pulls it off. Dennett reveals he’s fooled them with the very name of the trick: Not “Tuned” or “Deck” but… “The.” He’s simply using a different method every time, always avoiding the one his colleagues are testing in each performance. So, at least, it might be with dignity, which might not have to do only with autonomy or subjective well-being or any other single candidate, but some combination. You could then run through a series of cases that act as counterexamples to any one as the ground of dignity without really undermining the thought that these features capture everything centrally relevant to dignity.

This reminds me for all the world of Ayn Rand’s treatment of the concept of selfishness. In The Virtue of Selfishness, Rand sets for herself the challenge (as you might infer from the title) of describing selfishness as a virtue.

That’s obviously a tall order. The way she does it, in a nutshell, is by employing a vague and constantly shifting conception of “selfishness.” The selfishness she’d defending, we’re informed, is not mere selfishness, but “rational selfishness” and the selfishness of a man who lives “qua man.” This gives Rand considerable wiggle room, because it allows her to define selfishness in a way that excludes a variety of unsavory behaviors that the uninitiated might describe as “selfish.”

So, for example, a pickpocket is not behaving selfishly—even if he’s certain he’ll get away with it—because such an individual is living parasitically, and it’s not rational to want to live as a parasite. Or, a selfish person would give money to a starving artist because people have a rationally selfish interest in promoting values like great art.

What you’re left with, then, is a notion of “selfishness” that’s entirely unmoored from the ordinary dictionary definition of the term, and that in fact magically coincides with Rand’s own prejudices about how someone ought to behave. Kass’s notion of “dignity” (at least in Julian’s telling), has this same convenient property: safeguarding dignity just happens to require that we prohibit those activities that Kass happens to find icky. The lack of any coherent unifying principle makes it much easier to defend, because any time someone comes up with a compelling-sounding counterexample, you can shift your focus to a different facet of the concept that casts it in a more favorable light. This is very convenient for Kass (and Rand) but once the showmanship is stripped away, it’s not clear why anyone else should take it seriously.