B GAYMON BENNETT is Assistant Profes- “This book is a very timely analysis of the invocation and role ENNETT Technicians of Human Dignity traces the sor of Religion, Science, and Technology of appeals to ‘human dignity’ in the twentieth and twenty-first extraordinary rise of human dignity as a at Arizona State University. He is co- centuries.” defining concern of religious, political, author, with Paul Rabinow, of Designing —Whitney Bauman, Florida International and bioethical institutions over the last University T Human Practices: An Experiment with B half-century and offers original insight ODIES, SOULS, AND THE MAKIN Synthetic Biology and, with Ted Peters HUMAN OF ECHNICIANS into how human dignity has become “Technicians of Human Dignity is an analytical powerhouse; it and Karen Lebacqz, of Sacred Cells? threatened by its own success. The commands admiration.” Why Christians Should Support Stem —James Faubion, Rice University global expansion of dignitarian politics Cell Research. has left dignity without a stable set of meanings or referents, unsettling con- temporary economies of life and power. Engaging anthropology, theology, and bioethics, Bennett grapples with con- temporary efforts to mobilize human dignity as a counter-response to the biopolitics of the human body, and the breakdowns this has generated. To do G O this, he investigates how actors in piv- F INTRINSIC WORTH otal institutions—the Vatican, the United Nations, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues— reconceived human dignity as the BODIES, SOULS, bearer of intrinsic worth, only to become D frustrated by the Sisyphean struggle of IG AND THE MAKING OF TECHNICIANS turning its conceptions into practice. INTRINSIC WORTH NI T OF HUMAN Y j u s t i d e a s transformative ideals of FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS DIGNITY justice in ethical and New York GAYMON BENNETT political thought www.fordhampress.com FORDHAM Cover image: Gerhard Richter, “47” from War Cut II © Gerhard Richter 2015 Cover design by Janet Wood TECHNICIANS OF HUMAN DIGNITY F6671.indb i 9/16/15 10:38:56 AM F6671.indb ii 9/16/15 10:38:56 AM just ideas transformative ideals of justice in ethical and political thought series editors Drucilla Cornell Roger Berkowitz F6671.indb iii 9/16/15 10:38:56 AM F6671.indb iv 9/16/15 10:38:56 AM TECHNICIANS OF HUMAN DIGNITY BODIES, SOULS, AND THE MAKING OF INTRINSIC WORTH Gaymon Bennett fordham university press new york 2016 F6671.indb v 9/16/15 10:38:56 AM Copyright © 2016 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. 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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bennett, Gaymon (date) Technicians of human dignity : bodies, souls, and the making of intrinsic worth / Gaymon Bennett. — First edition. pages cm. — (Just ideas : transformative ideals of justice in ethical and political thought) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8232-6777-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Respect for persons. 2. Bioethics. 3. Human rights. 4. Vatican Council (2nd : 1962–1965 : Basilica di San Pietro in Vaticano). Constitutio pastoralis de ecclesia in mundo huius temporis. 5. United Nations. I. Title. bj1533.r42b46 2016 179.7—dc23 2015017378 Printed in the United States of America 18 17 16 5 4 3 2 1 First edition F6671.indb vi 9/16/15 10:38:56 AM Contents Preface: Th e Motion of Inquiry ix Introduction: Figuring Human Dignity 1 I Human Dignity and the Vatican 1. Th e Church, the Secular, and Pastoral Power 25 2. Th e Ontology of Vocation: Gaudium et spes 63 II Human Dignity and the United Nations 3. Incapacity by Design: Politics, Sovereignty, and Human Rights 107 4. Dignity and Governance: Th e Universal Declaration of Human Rights 134 Diagnostic Excursus: Economies of Life and Power 165 III Human Dignity and the President’s Council on Bioethics 5. Bioethics and the Reconfi guration of Biopolitics 201 6. Th e Biopolitical Pastoral: Beyond Th erapy 238 Methodological Epilogue: Toward an Anthropology of Figuration 275 Notes 287 Index 313 F6671.indb vii 9/16/15 10:38:56 AM F6671.indb viii 9/16/15 10:38:56 AM Preface: Th e Motion of Inquiry I began the work that led to this book amid breakdowns connected to the notion of human dignity and to the politics of intrinsic worth that have accompanied that term since the mid-twentieth century. Despite what some have suggested, these breakdowns have not been primarily discursive—though ever since the global expansion of human rights discourses in the 1970s, one prominent response has been a multiplication of talk about human dignity and its discontents. Th ese breakdowns, rather, have been taking place at other critical junctures. Most importantly, they have been taking place at those junctures where the question of how to talk about human dignity has become bound up in the problem of how to turn it into a practice. spiritual politics In the postwar era, human dignity began to be fashioned as the anchor point for what might be called a “spiritual politics”: spiritual in that the politics of human dignity have been indexed to something “essential” about human life that needs to be made the norm of material existence, political in that human dignity has become the animating concern of sustained eff orts to rethink dominant modes and forms of power. Despite being elaborated across diverse venues, the spiritual politics of human dignity have been fashioned in a remarkably consistent manner. In the fi rst place, human dignity has been fashioned as intrinsic. It has been talked about, acted on, and instituted as though “grounded” in nothing other than itself. It is for this rea- son, for example, that the authors of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights ix F6671.indb ix 9/16/15 10:38:56 AM x Preface: Th e Motion of Inquiry simply declaimed dignity and never directly explained what they meant by the term. Dignity, rendered in a declamatory style, can be thought of as self-justifying. In the second place, dignity has been put forward as a matrix of human worth par excellence. Human dignity (to put it in negative terms) has not been cast as one aspect of human worth alongside others—and certainly not as an aspect of human worth derived from other features of human life, such as the capacity for reason or self-governance. It has been fashioned, rather, as original and defi ning. Human dignity has been styled as primordial. In the third place, while fashioned as intrinsic and primordial, human dignity has also been cast as vulnerable, threatened by distinctively modern forms of power. Concerned actors have insisted that under the shadow of modernity something un- equivocally valuable and vulnerable is at stake. Dignity, thus styled, must urgently be defended. Th at today all three of these characteristics are treated as self-evident by pro- ponents of “dignitarian politics”—and dismissed as self-evidently problematic by critics—is testament to the ubiquity of dignity’s postwar elaboration. In what fol- lows I will unpack how this self-evidence was achieved. Th e point I want to draw out here is simply that whatever one makes of this fi gure of human dignity—as self- justifying, primordial, and vulnerable—it stabilized and became dominant in the postwar era. In recent decades, however, it has been destabilized, and its dominance has been put to the test. biopolitical tests Over the past three decades, the fi gure of human dignity has been mobilized as a guiding norm for governing the biopolitical body. By biopolitical I mean those dimensions of human vitality that since the nineteenth century have been made the target of sustained political energies—from how grain is grown and circulated to the economy, of birthrates, morbidity, and mortality, to city planning and the spread of infectious disease. It is within the space of these mobilizations—within these eff orts to govern the politics of human vitality in the name of human dignity—that the ethics and politics of intrinsic worth have begun to break down. Th ey have be- gun to break down in the sense that previous ways of acting, relating, and thinking can no longer be taken for granted. Th ere are, no doubt, countless local and circumstantial reasons for this break- down. But at the heart of things lies a tension of conceptual and operational logics. To put simply here what I will detail further on: the logic of biopolitics and the logic of human dignity are sharply contrastive. Th e fi rst is relative and ameliorative, the second intrinsic and invariable. F6671.indb x 9/16/15 10:38:56 AM Preface: Th e Motion of Inquiry xi Th e biopolitical operates through mechanisms of normalization. It seeks to de- termine what is biologically “normal” for a given population in order to infl ect those norms—the World Health Organization’s “Millennial Development Goals” is a prominent example. In the postwar period, the politics of human dignity were made to operate on an orthogonal logic to such normalization.