Technicians of Human Dignity: Bodies, Souls, and the Making of Intrinsic Worth

337 Pages·2016·2.367 MB·English

by  Gaymon Bennett

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just ideas transformative ideals of fordham university press
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TECHNICIANS OF HUMAN DIGNITY
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j u s t i d e a s
transformative ideals of justice in ethical and political thought
series editors
Drucilla Cornell
Roger Berkowitz
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TECHNICIANS OF
HUMAN DIGNITY
BODIES, SOULS, AND THE MAKING
OF INTRINSIC WORTH
Gaymon Bennett
fordham university press
new york 2016
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Copyright © 2016 Fordham University Press
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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
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Contents
Preface: Th e Motion of Inquiry ix
Introduction: Figuring Human Dignity 1
Human Dignity and the Vatican
I
1. Th e Church, the Secular, and Pastoral Power 25
2. Th e Ontology of Vocation: Gaudium et spes 63
Human Dignity and the United Nations
II
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
Human Dignity and the President’s Council on Bioethics
III
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
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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
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