Appeals to "human dignity" are at the core of many of the most contentious social and political issues of our time. But these appeals suggest different and at times even contradictory ways of understanding the term. Is dignity something we all share equally, and therefore the reason we all ought to be treated as equals? Or is it what distinguishes some greater and more admirable human beings from the rest? What notion of human dignity should inform our private judgments and our public life?

In Neither Beast Nor God, Gilbert Meilaender elaborates the philosophical, social, theological, and political implications of the question of dignity, and suggests a path through the thicket. Meilaender, a noted theologian and a prominent voice in America's bioethics debates, traces the ways in which notions of dignity shape societies, families, and individual lives, and incisively cuts through some common confusions that cloud our thinking on key moral and ethical questions. The dignity of humanity and the dignity of the person, he argues, are distinct but deeply connected--and only by grasping them both can we find our way to a meaningful understanding of the human condition.


Author: Gilbert Meilaender
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 09/29/2009
Series: Encounter Broadsides
Pages: 180
Weight: 0.79lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.30w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9781594032578


Review Citation(s):
Choice 02/01/2010

About the Author
GILBERT MEILAENDER is the Richard & Phyllis Duesenberg Professor of Christian Ethics at Valparaiso University. He is a member of the President's Council on Bioethics and a Fellow of the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank. He is the author of Bioethics: A Primer for Christians. He lives in Valparaiso, Indiana.