1948-1998: More than 50 years have passed since the official Declaration of Human Rights. A stream of events has taken place: the crumbling of an empire, the slow growth of a European Union, but also new outbreaks of barbarism and genocide. At the same time, science has brought forth new challenges–among them, the investigation of the human genome, deeper knowledge of the beginnings of human life, together with inevitable adjacent issues such as the patentability of segments of the genome, the use of embryos in research, euthanasia, etc. It is impossible to sum up the last 10 years, let alone the century or the millennium. Yet, out of a whole batch of pertinent questions, we might probe one that is particularly interesting: What is our main concern today when we think about the human person? Is our way of seeing the human being the same as that tried out 10 years ago? This investigation is certainly contemporary, but this is true of all periods–the task of understanding the being of man and woman (as homo or vir) is as modern today as it was 10 years ago or as it will be in 10 years’ time. Thus, it would be correct to pick up again the thread of the discourse begun a long time ago. This does not entail obsoleteness. Philosophy is not like science; a five-year old science magazine might be outdated in terms of natural science, whereas a dialogue by Plato, the Summa Theologica by St Thomas Aquinas, or a work by Locke may be more modern than many recent philosophical works.

Here, however, the orientation will be somewhat different; we shall try to highlight some of the difficulties we feel or sense in our day-to-day life. Thus, our questioning will depend more on practical ethics than on speculative inquiry into the essence of the human being. Still, concrete questions, even in philosophy, often raise the greatest theoretical difficulties. Thus, we shall propose four difficulties, presented in the form of four trilogies that enunciate four aspects of our concerns.

The first difficulty worth noting bears on an aspect of the relationship of dignity and identity. In effect, this relationship is undergoing change imperceptibly, raising the question of how convictions and tolerance articulate in our way of thinking about our identity. Each one of us holds his or her own convictions, and we have always known that our neighbour’s convictions do not coincide necessarily with ours. None of this worried us, inasmuch as dialogue left our certainties almost intact, as if nothing could sway them. Collectively we did feel the error, as if scepticism of perverse ideologies insidiously permeated our certitudes. Moreover, certainties relating to the permanence of standards of behaviour actually fell apart, with each generation bringing a fresh set of novelties, not only aesthetic but also social and moral. Dissension has taken such hold that great general confusion has set in regarding rules of conduct, education, essential values, and our outlook on life. Although we hold onto them, our certainties are affected by a coefficient of doubt greater than in the past. Like some new evil genius, the venom of doubt murmurs within us: "What if I were wrong, after all?" Whatever the source of these ideas–social, political, educational, moral, etc.–doubt widens its sphere of influence, slipping into zones where we do not expect it. The speed with which ideas spread, the multiplicity of encounters availed by the mass media, all contribute to flood us increasingly with a profusion of information that we are often unable to critically assimilate. New, nonrationalised convictions drive out the old, taking away their strength. In the end, reason is confined to the mathematical or empirical sciences, while the domain once ruled by "practical wisdom"–by prudence, using Aristotle’s terminology–has been abandoned to free will, which relies only on sense impressions and on yearnings for power.

On such grounds, a poor sense of tolerance grows; tolerance is rooted no longer in a soil of strong convictions but in their absence. Instead of denoting progress in respect for the other, this kind of tolerance is silently identical to indifference, which finds all convictions acceptable because they serve only as possible remedies for the existential angst of each one. This form of tolerance accompanies a moment of crisis in practical reason and of tacit capitulation of devotion to any values other than those of social and economic success. As Eça de Queiroz wrote some 100 years ago in his Letters from Paris, the essential thing is to get one’s name in the papers; to become a media personality, as we say now, by appearing on TV, by becoming part of the so-called "jet set." Thereupon, paradoxically, the relation between private and public life becomes perverted: on the one hand, behaviour usually reserved for private life invades the public sphere, while, on the contrary, a new gulf opens between deep feelings and their external, visible expressions. It is in this sense that we may say that in the person’s heart, in the core of the person’s private life, there tends to be a growing inability to find the sources of happiness. Of course, the problem of human identity goes on being analysed and debated, but at the same time, it is redirected to one’s personal convictions, whose incompatibility seems to justify all sorts of contradictory behaviour, perhaps unacceptable to many eyes.

In truth, not everything is possible now–there is a borderline beyond which behaviour is deemed almost unanimously to be ethically reprehensible. Indeed there are boundaries in place, which attest genuine progress in culture and civilisation. The political and international recognition of the inviolable dignity of each human being, despite the impossibility of reaching agreement as to its grounds, already represents an unquestionable value in human relationships. A minimum of agreement on the ethical dignity of the human being, on its fundamental rights, understood up to now as rights more personal than social, is essential to protect the peaceful coexistence of individuals and nations. Thus, not all kinds of behaviour are now juridically allowed; indeed, it is paradoxical that perhaps no century has gone so far in the practice of horrors against human beings, while going so far in subsequent reactions that defend their dignity. Notwithstanding this, within the interval delimited by the boundaries of acceptance of human dignity, doubt and scepticism have set in, together with a poor idea of tolerance. This situation is evident in the way scientific research treats human life in its beginnings, and in the way the reigning economic liberalism ultimately reduces human beings to their reproductive function.

The challenge that confronts us is the discovery of a new sense of tolerance, which allows the dynamic coexistence of individuals and collectivities. The basis of tolerance is not the banal acceptance of the lowest common denominator between various convictions; it is the acceptance, within previously established bounds, of strong differences that must coexist. The issue of tolerance has a direct bearing (or an indirect one, at the very least) on the understanding of human identity. Given that our existence must be lived as "co-existence", the convictions of others enter the sphere of our thinking, conditioning our reflexes and actions–from rejection, fear and isolation to the struggle for mastery and power. The just mean would lie in understanding the other’s conviction, even when the other’s words and actions touch the limits of acceptance; at that point, dialogue may institute a dynamic of reciprocal approximation, seeking common ways to act that are guided by the dignity of the human being. Thus, instead of being a purely formal concept, dignity becomes inscribed in the space-time of one culture and in the dialogue between cultures. That is why the dignity of Man is not a static but a dynamic concept, requiring at all times the adjustments and improvements that dialogue can achieve. By going beyond pure formalism, the dignity of the human being will communicate content to the identity of the human being, and thus keep it from reduction to mere data on an ID card.

As we look around us, however, sooner or later we experience the inverse: success and authenticity do not run hand in hand in our world, so that we often witness the triumph of unauthenticity, by virtue of which appearance eclipses being. What is essential is no longer the intrinsic value of the achievement or work done, but the art of showing off and acting "as if" the visible achievement were the absolute best. What is shown becomes pure appearance in the negative sense of the word, that is to say, form without content, superficial gloss devoid of action that truly changes reality. We all know, for example, that politics abounds in pseudo-actions, pseudo-reforms, pseudo-persons, and pseudo-facts, in "political" facts artificially created in order to make us forget the real problems. Let us not criticise the politicians alone, however, for the same happens in almost every area of existence. Many of the current philosophical–and scientific–publications that flood the market contain but pseudo-thoughts, many are hollow books whose sole purpose is to enrich a Curriculum Vitae. Will authenticity perish in the face of unauthenticity? If the bad penny can drive out the good one, we might think that giving up is the internal risk that threatens our identity–we don’t mean giving up life, but desisting from the struggle for the values in which we believed early on in life, for instance, at the start of our professional career. "It is not worth it to struggle to improve institutions," we might think, for they are so ponderous that they will crush any such attempts, however well-intentioned. Doubt sets camp in the field of action, in view of the success of venality in all matters and of the triumph of the forces of inertia.

It is good then to return to an interpretation of the dignity of the human being that is ethical, rather than juridical. This dignity involves a capacity for commitment that, despite and beyond the weight of inertia, makes the human being truly human, and endows him with greatness amid his weaknesses and despair. It is no doubt a different concept of dignity, unlike the concept that underlies national or international declarations of human rights. According to this new concept, dignity is the result of human existence, not its starting point. Dignity becomes almost equivalent to the ethical quality of the experienced contents of existence, as if it was affirmed that, because we are all equally "dignified" [digno] and respectable, human beings do not confer upon their human dignity a content that is equally or similarly deserving of value [digno de valor].

Paul Ricoeur says that we must progress from Man coupable [guilty] to Man capable. We would extend this to say that we must recover our capacity for action starting from the zero moment in each of us, represented by ethical unauthenticity. In this different usage of the concept of dignity, what is at stake is no longer our formal identity–an identity that is marked by the act of birth and stamped in our ID card–but the return of our being to its fons et origo, to its original capabilities. According to Aquinas, the interconnection between being and action means that action "ensues from" being or corresponds to it; reciprocally, we shall arrive at our identity (that is, our being) by the way we manage the commitment (action) that makes visible our wish to be.

Thus, we are closer to the biblical vision of the world than to Greek thinking, inasmuch as identity, according to the biblical universe, emerges primarily from how one acts and not from one’s "ontological" being. Now, it may be said that contemporary thought is seeking conciliation between the speculative interpretation of the human being (in the Greek manner) and the approach to human identity based on the existential dynamics of action. Thinkers such as Levinas and Arendt are found at this philosophical crossroads; it is no accident, either, that over the past few years there has been a multiplication of philosophical studies on the concept of responsibility. To acquiesce to a request entails a commitment, which, as a "response" to an appeal, becomes a responsibility. The commitment ensures mediation between the response and the responsibility, as if responsibility were the capacity to respond to an expectation placed on the human being. The effectiveness of the commitment gives content to the "ethical" dignity of the human being. While human beings are formally equal in dignity–which is expressed juridically as the dignity of "every human being"–they differ by virtue of the ethical contents generated by the multiple forms of the commitments they effectively make.

The connection between our personal identity and the commitment that expresses our wish to be is neither ad hoc nor fragmentary. This connection must be regarded as subjective and temporal in duration. It would retreat into the inexpressible mystery of each person if it could not be expressed, at least partially. Now, the form of language appropriate to express it is the narrative.

It is no accident that the last two or three decades have seen the development of studies on narrative [narratividade], both in the scope of the literary sciences and in philosophy. Paul Ricoeur was one of the great theoreticians of philosophical narration, particularly in the trilogy he published over 1983-1985, Temps et récit [Time and Tale]. Even the term "history" is overburdened, since it means the history of what happened (and was lost in the silence of the past) as well as history as the narrative produced by historians. There is a connection between these two senses, between the Geschichte and the Historie of the German language. Narrative history revives in the present the fabric of human acts and the sufferings, activities and passivities, that make up the plot of past history. Historians are thus the guardians of memory, without which there is no identity, collective or personal. Documents, monuments, signs, and testimonies of all kinds, from civil registries to oral interpretations and eyewitness disclosures, support the memory that governs narrative history. But narrative reconstitutes the acts and events of history experienced. Now, the contents of living memory give temporal density to our human identity. It is not only the history of institutions, of societies, or States that needs to be kept alive, but also the individual histories of each human being.

In this context, it is opportune to remember that the issue of the "identity" of the human being was affected by studies of narration. In the mid-20th century, phenomenology insisted on human identity as the body experienced and as temporality. This was, as it were, a formal concept of temporality, of temporality insofar as it affects every existence. One aspect it failed to stress–brought out particularly by the hermeneutic school–was the living contents of this subjective temporality. The latter is jointly the vehicle for the time plane [tempo] of a cultural tradition, which gives roots to human life, and for the time plane of the events in a unique life, of the events that weave, on the backdrop of the grand history of the world, a small individual history.

The concrete narrative of our personal existence provides the specific contents of our temporal identity. Now, because there is no narration without scansion, without caesura or rhythm, the narrative will hinge on actual events held to be remarkable. In effect, in the life of individuals just as in the life of the world, a strange phenomenon takes place, whereby events experienced initially as not particularly outstanding will be revealed in a later interpretation as having opened the future, becoming a posteriori candidates to the role of founding events. Such events are at the root of a series of other events that they made possible. Yet, at the time they were experienced there was not clear explicit awareness of their founding role. For example, were the Apostles aware that Christ’s resurrection was the founding event it was and continues to be for Christians? Likewise, amorous encounters or the factors that govern the choice of a profession obey this "logic" of events that lay the foundation for a future still unknown. This kind of narrative will not lean for support only on words said and reproduced, but also on other elements that are part of our memory, such as photographs and objects that are emotionally charged because they serve as "reminders" of moments experienced with particular density. Such elements must not be neglected when we inquire into the identity of a particular human being. Human identity cannot do without a determinate past and a future that is partially determinable; to kill a person’s identity, just as killing a culture, consigns to intentional oblivion on’s tradition and memory.

A narrative consists in condensing time and in stressing points considered pertinent. Because the choice of these stresses and of the contours they lend to that history depends on the narrator’s activity, it may be said that past history awaits the historian who is able to do it justice. Hence, past history is always open to reinterpretation, because the interpretative lines of force [eixos interpretativos] and the points of view that ground the presentation are not previously fixed. Now, it is the narrative that protects history from forgetfulness, from oblivion. This thesis may be, and ought to be applied to individual history, in which case it will take on specific contours. At the same time, however, no history is exempt from forgetfulness.

Forgetfulness is part of the narrative, so much so that, if personal identity is incorporated into the narrative that spells it out, then that identity also entails forgetfulness. What forgetfulness is meant here? I have definitely forgotten that I am unable to recall, for instance, my own birth and the first years of my childhood. This profound forgetfulness may propagate to diverse areas in my life. There is also a less deep psychological forgetfulness, compatible with the ability to recall. Yet, just as memory is not pure psychological recall reproducing the past, forgetfulness, likewise, is not the pure psychological vanishing of the ability to remember.

Without going into the meanders of psychoanalytical interpretations, we may affirm that there is a form of "narrative" forgetfulness that corresponds to the explicit intention of not constituting some datum in the past as a founding event. This form of forgetfulness corresponds to an act of will that desists from the real, perhaps spontaneous, possibility of integrating into the history, our own or social and political history, such and such event, encounter, suffering, success, or failure. This is not forgetfulness in the sense of a disappearance from memory; it is a matter of not integrating something into the central lines of force of the narrative plot of an existence.

In truth, there may be two cases in the constitution of this narrative, for the "forgotten" act, fact, or event may be "forgotten" in two ways. On the one hand, its nonintegration means that it is not part of the central interpretative moments of the narrative, because the weight it might have been accorded in a different interpretation is not recognised. This willful forgetfulness corresponds to an active attitude by the historian–possibly the "I" in the case of an autobiography–who considers that, for the purposes of the narrative, such facts, events or decisions are not relevant or significant. It is said that all autobiographies are a lie precisely because they "forget"–often intentionally–facts, events, or encounters that might affect negatively the biographer’s image.

On the other hand, an ethical attitude might motivate the forgetfulness. This is the case when the narrator decides to invert the meaning of an act or fact of personal, social or political history. This is a different form of wilful forgetfulness. The way we see it, the ethical dimension of forgetfulness corresponds anthropologically to a manifestation of forgiveness. Forgiveness is not in effect the abolition of the marks (perhaps still visible) of some event, or of its inevitable consequences, but of the significance it takes upon the integration of its significance into a certain history. Maybe that is how we may understand the "pleas for forgiveness" for certain historical acts in the past. At the end of the twentieth century, the theme of pleas for forgiveness has been especially debated, namely concerning the attitude of the Catholic and other churches that have sought a "purification of memory". This initiative aroused reactions of opposite sign. Side by side with praise, there was talk of ambiguous acts, of "politically convenient" acts, since the past cannot be changed, anyway, and no one is speaking of the aberrations of today. Victims will be victims, with or without pleas for forgiveness. The above evaluation proves that all acts–including the plea for forgiveness–are open to considerably divergent interpretations, giving rise to diverse historical narratives. The case in point seems exemplary: indeed, what the plea for forgiveness determines first of all is the official designation of the victim as such by the institution that made it a victim. The institution acknowledges the past act, declared ethically perverse, now imbued with a new meaning, which is public and no longer private. The constitution of the history modifies the forms of forgetfulness by dint of what is stressed, changing the presentation of identity both personal and institutional. To consider the past as fixed, closed, not open to "alteration" by the new interpretations provided about it manifests profound ignorance of the meaning of history as a narrative rooted in the understanding of a personal or institutional identity. It is true that one may ask about the authenticity of this reinterpretation and about the future consequences that are supposed to ensue from it. Thus, a reinterpretation of the past would lack authenticity if it did not place a commitment on future action, conditioning the latter to not reproduce that which is considered an error or perversion of the past. Even so, the legitimate and necessary question about authenticity may not disqualify at the start the sense of reinterpretation of the past, due to the indispensable dialectic between identity, narrative and reinterpretation of the central lines of force of this narrative. That is why decisions and acts such as the "plea for forgiveness" and the "purification of memory" confer upon historic meaning an ethical dimension, which, by reinterpreting the past, set guides for the future and modify the present identity.

Thus, what the question of identity conveys today is how identity articulates with temporal duration and with the narrative of its self-understanding. As Ricoeur saw it, the narrative serves identity, manifesting its permanence as human identity–and, we might add, as identity of an institutional type, too. Yet, just as every narrative is open to reinterpretation, human identity is likewise open to its own reinterpretations. The novelty of this inherent trait of identity resides in the incorporation into the form of personal identity of its contents, that is, of the narrative unity of time as lived experience [tempo vivido].

The history of bioethics does not escape these problems. How can the dignity of the human being motivate and ground the decisions needed to answer the questions raised by science? Note that the question may be formulated inversely: what contents will accrue to "human dignity" from concrete answers to the challenges of bioethics? What is at stake is the dignity of the human being, which stands to such decisions and concrete answers not only as a stable grounds but also as their content, a content that is culturally contingent and permanently threatened. That is why the historical narrative the future produces based on today’s answers will focus on describing the contents we are building now for our human identity. It will be the task of the future to clarify what progress we may have made in our ethical understanding of human dignity.

One last concern, out of other eligible concerns that we find particularly pertinent to an up-to-date discourse on the ethical dignity of Man, turns on the relationship between consciousness and determinism. Each era comes up with a new approach to this relationship; while the question remains the same in broad formal terms–the similarity of the question is all the more interesting for the constant refreshment of its formulation. In Saint Augustin’s theology, the meeting of Grace and Freedom led to a quarrel about predestination: does free, non-determined choice exist? This theological context was reactivated in the sixteenth century, through the impact of the theological disputes stirred by the beginnings of Protestantism. Then the development of science, in the wake of the rationalism of the Enlightenment, set the stage for the entrance of determinism, which negated freedom. At the core of the human being, were discerned sources that unconsciously conditioned his action. The theological predetermination of freedom gave way to scientific determinism in the comprehension of the human being. We might say that this determinism feeds on the new discoveries of the sciences of man in order to segregate forms that are ever finer and more acute. In the nineteenth century, the impact of experimental psychology led to freedom being contested; in the twentieth century, using its newly found autonomy, sociology constituted as subject of scientific discourse the social group instead of the individual person. And nowadays, the century of biology that prefigures itself–or, indeed, has started already–constitutes as subject of the discourse not conscious freedom any longer, but instead the genome on the one hand, and on the other, without incompatibility, the electrochemical functioning of the neurones. In this perspective, vulgarised by scientists who see themselves as the true philosophers of the future, what is resurfacing today is but the age-old problem of determinism and predestination. The dualism of Descartes might appear as a so-called "error" to someone who is convinced that he is reduced to an exclusively biological dimension; likewise, Spinoza’s psycho-physical parallelism is held to reproduce in more sophisticated guise the "error" of Descartes. To leave error behind and enter the land of truth would require the scientific conversion of our way of looking: it would be a matter of grasping that the subject who speaks in us is but the resultant of neuronal interactions with environmental stimuli. Becoming articulated with the decoding of the genome, the problematics of thought would not be far from being interpreted as the manifestation of a genetic predetermination; thus, we should expect the discovery of the gene of ethical behaviour that is manifest in our neurones, the gene of happiness and–why not?–the gene of science and the gene of the scientific discovery of the genes?

Undoubtedly, scientific "materialism" has shifted from Marxist theory to the domain of science, in particular to biology, both molecular and genetic. As a philosophical theory, materialism is not deduced necessarily from science in the manner of a syllogistic conclusion; nonetheless, still from the philosophical point of view, it is a permanent temptation to the scientist who has not looked long into the epistemological critique of scientific knowledge. A certain notion of causality operates in the neuronal determination of the phenomena of the mind, just as genes exert their own causality on the makeup of the human body. The question to which there is still no answer has to do with the possibility of a different kind of understanding of the human phenomenon studied biologically; without denying in the least the value of this scientific method, we must analyse the relation established a priori between the field of objectivity of that which is under study and the method that studies it. For the scientific discourse now practised, this issue is hardly relevant, inasmuch as the scientist considers that it is the very nature of phenomena that determines the method of analysis. In the scientist’s view, therefore, the method may not be questioned, as if a priori–that is, even before the determination of the empirical method–there had been an epistemological decision regarding the explanation of the workings of the genetic or neuronal "material". It is at this level that scientist and philosopher disagree–at least the philosopher as understood in the present study. The scientist’s presupposition–here, too, we must repeat, a certain type of scientist that does not correspond to all scientists but only to those we consider to be marked by the philosophical presuppositions of "scientific materialism"–consists in not accepting the possibility of an approach to the phenomenon of the mind that does not depend exclusively on biological analysis. The word exclusively is crucial, because logically it marks the difference between a necessary condition and a sufficient condition. It is necessary that all mental functioning depends on a certain biological structure, whose functioning is painstakingly being revealed to us by extraordinary scientific analysis. But the enthusiasm around this discovery is converted into a wrong philosophical thesis when it considers that the key to explaining the "mystery" of the mind, of consciousness and freedom lies in the chemical, electrical and other impulses that regulate nervous functioning.

Just as there is no human freedom without a living body, there is no healthy mind without the regular functioning of the neuronal synapses. It is not because the life of the neurones determines the possibility of consciousness that this biological "determination" must be seen as pure and simple determinism of the mind. In other words, to determine the possibility of consciousness and to determine consciousness is not the same thing. We mean by this that consciousness exists "for itself" and not for the neurones, which would be the "conscious subject". It is from the point of view of consciousness that neurones determine the possibility of consciousness, and not from the point of view of the neurones themselves. Science, with masterly spirit, succeeds in distinguishing the alterations in consciousness due to accidental or intentional interventions in brain functions. Yet, the world of consciousness, because it can be understood only by consciousness itself, is not open to "comprehension" by science.

Being valid to the debate of the "empirical science of consciousness"–a debate most relevant today–the reasoning above is fully pertinent, too, regarding the "conditioning" by genes of the self-awareness of which each individual is capable. Hence, the "determinant" function of neurones does not entail even remotely any scientific "determinism" of self-awareness or "feeling of self". Indeed, the philosophical aphorism, "the spirit is understandable only to the spirit," indicates that it is not possible to stand outside the problematics of the spirit and, at the same time, expect to watch the blossoming [eclosão] of spirit, which would thus become transparent from the point of view of neurons, of genes or of the body itself objectively apprehended. Scientific determinism is inhabited by a latent or underlying yearning for omnipotence, that is, by a vow to explain so adequately the material substratum of consciousness and spirit that, one day, we might be able to produce it and thereby lay out with complete intelligibility the working mind or thought itself. As an ideal that guides and drives scientific research, this yearning might prove fecund; yet, when it is justified by the belief that it will come true one day because it is in itself feasible, it rests on a serious philosophical error, epistemological as well as ontological, an error that surpasses by far any naïveté on the part of Descartes.

From the perspective of phenomenology, consciousness keeps some distance between itself and itself, failing to coincide completely with itself. In our view, this inadequacy might be seen as outlining the space–the metaphoric space–in which is inscribed the double finitude of consciousness, that finitude that impedes its access to the absolute knowledge of the real, but also the finitude that shows the necessity of bodily mediation, that is to say, in the case at hand, the need to unconsciously pass through the neuronal mediation to gain access to itself. Hence, it is not science that may see its determinations or scientific data as inducing full determinism of consciousness; it is consciousness, adopting a scientific attitude–which is also a conscious attitude– that may recognise its biological determinations as an expression of its finitude.

Thus, the conceptual trilogy spirit–determinism–freedom comes to mean that science, as a (spiritual) moment of empirical understanding of the human being, stands at the locus of mediation between, on the one hand, the possibility enjoyed by human beings to understand themselves spiritually (not only empirically) and, on the other hand, the ever personal path made possible and inaugurated by this understanding. In this sense, human freedom, far from being reduced to a pure possibility of choice, is the realisation of spirit in the humanity of the human being.

At the terminus of this journey in which we enunciated four difficulties out of those that belong in the discussion of the contents of human dignity, we may ask what is the link that connects these four conceptual trilogies. The challenge posed to the understanding of dignity lies in the median term of these trilogies. Above all, the perspective we chose consisted in extending the discussion of human dignity beyond the formalism to which it is usually confined. It was not our goal to complete the range of human rights that various declarations try to detail and structure. In effect, it was necessary to take the discussion into the crossroads where philosophical anthropology and ethics meet, so as to discern the specific contents that, in this turn-of-the-century Western culture, best serve our thinking about human dignity. Now, on a first analysis, four challenges present themselves, namely, the practice of tolerance, giving up, forgetfulness and determinism. In each of these four cases, two orientations exerted their pull, one negative and the other positive.

Thus, tolerance appeared either as the banal acceptance of all opinions on the basis of a deep-seated scepticism or as an attitude that, albeit based on strong conviction, wishes to practice respect for other person’s beliefs, although this takes place within certain limits that are culturally pre-established. Giving up seemed to emerge from the authenticity of the being who wishes "to keep his hands clean" and therefore does not enter games of compromise, as if all compromise or commitment were merely a form of engagement, but also a useless perversion. On the other hand, giving up was also the hypothesis of action that, once overcome, brought forth the virtue of a real commitment-engagement. Thus, giving up appears as an act of retreat or as a moment that demands and prepares an authentic commitment based this time on the authenticity of existence.

Forgetfulness made an entrance in connection with the narrative, since the latter contributes to the emergence of temporal unity in human identity. But forgetfulness connotes diverse attitudes, the most negative of which is forgetfulness of the founding moments of our individual or collective history. On the contrary, when forgetfulness is apprehended ethically it opens a new and liberating future to the history of intersubjective relationships both private and institutional. This ethical form of forgetfulness is not to be identified with historical silence but, on the contrary, with the forgiveness that may arise only out of a new interpretative reading. That is why such a reading is beyond the task of the historian, belonging rather to an ethics of history–that is, then, in its undeniable richness, the positive meaning of forgiveness.

Finally, determinism is invested with antagonic meanings. If it is taken to mean that human beings are but the interplay of biological factors, of which science alone–and not consciousness–is "conscious", we cannot discern the benefits that human dignity may gain from this standpoint, which gathers to itself the new sundry forms of biological-scientific materialism. The biological determination of mind, consciousness and spirit must be seen as a necessary condition, not as a sufficient condition for the understanding of conscious phenomena. The positive side of this kind of determinism, or rather, of these biological determinations of consciousness is that it lets us apprehend them as mediators of consciousness in its course of freedom.

These four challenges may originate opposing answers; still, there is no doubt that human dignity comes out victorious and enriched when the self-understanding of the human being jointly supports tolerance in our own convictions and in profound respect for the other; when the commitment to values succeeds in overcoming the temptation of passive desistance; when a new reading of history confers upon forgetfulness the rich status of forgiveness, that eminent gift to the future; and finally when the determinism of scientific causality is seen to fit into the course of a freedom that is acknowledged to be finite.

Over the past few decades, bioethics has become the field where, increasingly, an extended dense concept of human dignity is at stake. The presupposition underlying our analysis implies that it is in the area of the fundamental grounds of action that we may come nearest to that concept. Philosophy has no pretension to replace life; yet, starting from life, it leads us back to life. It is in this sense that it may render service to bioethics, since bioethics places itself at the service of the human being.