Liberalism and Human Dignity
While doing some background reading for a course on Bioethics, I ran across a compelling argument from Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, O.P. in his book Biomedicine & Beatitude: An Introduction to Catholic Bioethics in which he uses the idea of human dignity and the ideals as held by liberals to show that liberalism is at its core a contradiction when it comes to the selective or extrinsic application of who has human dignity and how much d ignity they are allotted. The argument goes like this. Liberalism prizes personal autonomy above all else. Anything that seeks to limit personal autonomy or at least their perception of personal autonomy (pro-life movements, legislation for traditional marriage, the expectation of never having one’s feelings hurt are just a few examples) is seen as an evil and should be decried. Therefore the liberal calls slavery, the holocaust, and genocide evil not because they are intrinsically but because they limit the autonomy in these groups ...