Moern and American Diginity

How have advances in science, technology, and especially biotechnology shaped our understanding of human dignity? Political philosopher Peter Augustine Lawler, who served on President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics, shows that the modern view denies what's good about who we are by nature, understanding human dignity as either autonomy (moral freedom from nature) or productivity (the transformation of nature through industrious ingenuity). The American understanding of dignity is more elevated, drawing from modern, Christian, and classical sources and maintaining that personal significance has a natural foundation. But this American view is now under assault from intellectual and cultural forces that deny our natural and creaturely dignity. 'Modern and American Dignity' draws out the personal significance of the ongoing threats to human dignity in an anxious and aging society open to the promises of cosmetic surgery and neurology, psychopharmacology, and the detachment of sex from reproduction. Drawing on Socrates, Solzhenitsyn, Tocqueville, Chantal Delsol, Chesterton, and many other thinkers, Lawler offers an indispensable guide to the moral dimension of conservatism today, and to who-as opposed to what-each of us is.