Yaming Li

Head transplantation has ignited intense discussions about whether it should be done scientifically and ethically. This paper examines the ethics of head transplantation from a Confucian perspective and offers arguments against the permissibility of head transplantation. From a Confucian point of view, human beings are the most precious organisms in the world, and ren and li are the basic moral principles of human beings. As long as head transplant technology remains underdeveloped, this procedure should not be done because it will pose a serious risk of harm to humans and thus violate the principles of Confucian ren and li. If head transplant technology matures to the point that it would be safe to try in humans, it still should not be performed because it would change the selfhood or identity of the head donor and the body donor and create a new person. Confucian personal virtues greatly depend on selfhood or personal identity, and selfhood or personal identity depend on one’s body cultivation and mind rectification. Through the hard effort of body cultivation and mind rectification, one transforms one’s selfhood or identity and personality. This selfhood, identity, and personality cannot be separated from one’s body but are embedded in one’s body. Thus, head transplant would destroy two persons’ identities and result in a new person, and the characteristics of this new person’s identity are still unknown.

Human dignity is a crucial concept in contemporary ethical, political and legal studies. However, people have different, even opposite understandings of human dignity, which has caused lots of confusion in related discourses. The Confucian notion of human dignity provides an important perspective for reflecting various theories of human dignity. In Confucian ethics, the basis of human dignity is the moral potential that every human being naturally has. Moral potential grants everyone universal dignity, while the development of moral potential grants people acquired dignity. Since all human beings have moral potential to the same extent, everyone owns universal dignity equally. Different people develop their moral potential to different extents. One’s acquired dignity is positively associated with the development of her moral potential. Universal dignity is a moral status but acquired dignity is not. To pursue acquired dignity is the moral demand of universal dignity and protects people’s universal dignity. Confucian discussions on human dignity provide not only a way to justify the equality of human moral status, but also a way to justify the moral obligation of protecting and developing human nature, thereby constituting a reliable theoretical basis for coping with ethical issues caused by biomedical technologies today.

Death with dignity is a significant issue in modern bioethics. In modern healthcare, the wide use of new technologies at the end of life has caused heated debate on how to protect human dignity. The key point of contention lies in the different understandings of human dignity and the dignity of death. Human dignity has never been a clear concept in Western ethical explorations, and the dignity of death has given rise to more confusions. Although there is no such term as “dignity” in Confucian ethics, there are discussions of a number of ideas related to human dignity and the dignity of death. Therefore, Confucian bioethics can offer a new perspective for understanding the theoretical difficulties associated with the dignity of death and new methods for solving them. In this article, we attempt to reconstruct Confucian views on human dignity and the dignity of death and, based on those views, to analyze the following issues: the relationship between the dignity of death and biological life, the relationship between the dignity of death and suffering, the relationship between the dignity of death and the autonomy of human beings, and the relationship between the dignity of death and social justice. This article will also compare the Confucian views on these issues with the views of Western philosophers. Confucian ethics can offer distinct answers to the above issues and help resolve some confusions concerning concepts and theories in Western research on the dignity of death.

The development of biotechnologies has broadly interfered with a number of life processes, including human birth. An important moral question arises from the application of such medical technologies to birth: do biotechnological advancements violate human dignity? Many valid arguments have been raised. Yet bioethicists are still far from reaching a consensus on how best to protect the dignity of human birth. Confucianism is an influential ethical theory in China and presents a distinctive understanding of human dignity. In this paper, we reconstruct the two Confucian concepts of dignity—namely, universal dignity and personal dignity. We then apply these concepts to human birth in the context of biotechnologies involving embryos and genetic enhancement. We conclude that the dual Confucian understanding of dignity contributes a valuable perspective to the question of whether biotechnologies related to human birth violate human dignity.