Dignity

Its History and Meaning

Michael Rosen

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780674068780
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Dignity plays a central role in current thinking about law and human rights, but there is sharp disagreement about its meaning. Combining conceptual precision with a broad historical background, Michael Rosen puts these controversies in context and offers a novel, constructive proposal."Penetrating and sprightly…Rosen rightly emphasizes the centrality of Catholicism in the modern history of human dignity. His command of the history is impressive…Rosen is a wonderful guide to the recent German constitutional thinking about human dignity…[Rosen] is in general an urbane and witty companion, achieving his aim of accessibly written philosophy."
—Samuel Moyn, The Nation "[An] elegant, interesting and lucid exploration of the concept of dignity...Drawing on classical, liberal and Catholic traditions, Rosen hopes to rehabilitate dignity to its rightful place near the centre of moral thought...Rosen's admirable book deserves wide attention from political theorists, jurisprudes and political philosophers."
—Simon Blackburn, Times Higher Education " Dignity deserves to be widely read, not only for its intrinsic interest, but also as a corrective to the habit of discussing such topics in abstraction from their social context. Whether or not one agrees with Rosen's arguments, there can be no doubt he has widened our horizons."
—Rae Langton, Times Literary Supplement

1

“THE SHIBBOLETH OF ALL EMPTY-HEADED MORALISTS”

I. Humbug?

Schopenhauer, the Ebenezer Scrooge of nineteenth-century philosophy, took a characteristically jaundiced view of talk of human dignity: “That expression, dignity of man, once uttered by Kant, afterward became the shibboleth of all the perplexed and empty-headed moralists who concealed behind that imposing expression their lack of any real basis of morals, or, at any rate, of one that had any meaning. They cunningly counted on the fact that their readers would be glad to see themselves invested with such a dignity and would accordingly be quite satisfied with it.” Is Schopenhauer right? Is the talk of “dignity” mere humbug—a pompous facade, flattering to our self-esteem but without any genuine substance behind it?

Schopenhauer’s criticism is troubling when we think how important the word “dignity” has become in contemporary political and ethical discussion. Dignity is central to modern human rights discourse, the closest that we have to an internationally accepted framework for the normative regulation of political life, and it is embedded in numerous constitutions, international conventions, and declarations. It plays a vital role, for example, in two fundamental documents from the late 1940s, the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the Grundgesetz (Basic Law) of the Federal Republic of Germany (1949). This is apparent from its prominent position in each text. The very first sentence of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration reads: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”; while Article 1 of the Grundgesetz states: “Human dignity is inviolable. To respect it and protect it is the duty of all state power. The German people therefore acknowledge inviolable and inalienable human rights as the basis of every community, of peace and of justice in the world.”

We should not infer from the close connection between “dignity” and human rights in such texts that talk about dignity is simply a piece of liberal piety, however. In August 2006, President Ahmadinejad of Iran (whose piety, I think it is fair to say, is more apparent than his liberalism) sent a strange letter to the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. It was written, to quote Ahmadinejad’s own words, from the conviction that it is “the common responsibility of all people with faith in God to defend human dignity and worth and to prevent violation of their rights and their humiliation, proceeding from the conviction that we are all created by the Almighty and that he has bestowed dignity upon us all and that no one has any special privileges over the other.” Ahmadinejad is very fond of the discourse of dignity. Shortly after his letter to Merkel, he rejected calls for Iran to subject its nuclear program to international control. Iran would not be intimidated by the West, he asserted, but would continue on its “path of dignity.”

“Dignity” appears frequently in faith-based ethical discourse. Although not the rhetorical property of any single religion, it is most prominent in Catholic thought. In Evangelium Vitae, the encyclical issued in March 1995 by Pope John Paul II to address questions of contraception, abortion, and the use of modern reproductive technologies (25.iii. 1995), the word is used no fewer than fifty-six times. Although there is no single authoritative source for Protestant doctrine, dignity is also a common theme in contemporary Protestant writing. Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, tells us that the dignity of man “consists of a unique freedom which is able not only to transcend the ‘laws’ of nature or of reason to which classical and modern culture would bind it, but also to defy and outrage the very structure of man’s existence”; while the celebrated German theologian Jürgen Moltmann, author of On Human Dignity, writes: “The dignity of each and every human being is grounded in [its] objective likeness of God” (a sentence that could just as easily have come from the pen of John Paul II or Benedict XVI).

It is striking in how many contexts one encounters the word—here are a few personal examples. As I write, I have in front of me a piece by the New York Times columnist David Brooks called “In Search of Dignity,” in which he regrets the passing of what he calls “the dignity code” of reticence and self-restraint from American public life (he points to the dignified figure of President Obama as a hopeful counter to the trend). In 2008 the Ig Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded to “The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) and the citizens of Switzerland for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity” (more on this below). A recently deceased former England football manager who had presided (as England managers do) over a heartbreaking defeat was described in his obituary in The Times as behaving with “stoicism and dignity” when (as is equally predictable) he was reviled and insulted in the popular press. More disturbingly, during the Pinochet years in Chile, a fundamentalist religious colony of German expatriates, run by a former Evangelical preacher (and pedophile), was used by the secret police for the torture and murder of opponents of the regime. The community’s name was Colonia Dignidad. (I did not open the spam e-mail I received recently whose subject header invited me to “Become the man of huge dignity,” but I think that I can make a good guess at its content.)

And yet, when we look at the concept of dignity from the viewpoint of philosophy, the situation is quite different. Although, apparently, no significant area of human life—from sport to architecture, from war to sexuality—is without its attendant philosophical specialists, conferences, and journals these days, the lack of philosophical interest in the concept of dignity is striking. That superbly comprehensive reference work, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, for example, contains no entry under “dignity.” Where they notice the concept of dignity at all, the attitude of philosophers is frequently dismissive or hostile. In 2002 the philosopher Ruth Macklin published an editorial in the British Medical Journal whose headline pretty much sums up its content: “Dignity is a useless concept. It means no more than respect for persons or their autonomy.” According to Macklin, “appeals to dignity are either vague restatements of other, more precise notions or mere slogans that add nothing to the understanding of the topic.”

For Macklin (like Schopenhauer) the concept of dignity is redundant at best—any content it has comes from another value, autonomy. Such a view of dignity is common among the relatively few contemporary philosophers writing in English who make mention of dignity. I take it that it is James Griffin’s view when he writes that “autonomy is a major part of rational agency, and rational agency constitutes what philosophers have often called, with unnecessary obscurity, the ‘dignity’ of the person.” And it was, it seems clear, also the view of the late Joel Feinberg: “Respect for persons may simply be respect for their rights, so that there cannot be one without the other; and what is called ‘human dignity’ may simply be the recognizable capacity to assert claims. To respect a person, then, or to think of him as possessed of human dignity simply is to think of him as a potential maker of claims.” For Feinberg, to respect the dignity of persons means just to respect persons, and we respect persons in exactly the same way as we respect the law. Just as we respect the speed limit by driving below 50 kph, so we respect persons by respecting their rights—not subjecting them to torture, arbitrary arrest, and so on and so forth.

The idea that dignity is redundant and could be replaced by another, more fundamental value may not be the only reason to be skeptical about its use in contemporary moral discourse, however. Another possibility is that, although there is a distinct value of dignity, it is not a universal moral value, as the Universal Declaration and the Grundgesetz would have it. Instead of dignity being a characteristic that all human beings have simply in virtue of being human, dignity is something more modest and restricted: an aesthetic quality that manifests itself in human behavior or (if that is something different) a virtue. On this view, some people (at least) are dignified (at least some of the time) but dignity is not a universal and inalienable property of human beings, something that gives a foundational reason for their having equal basic entitlements in relation to the actions of the state and fellow members of the human race (or, to put that mouthful in more simple terms: human rights).

Finally, skepticism about dignity can take a third form—the idea that dignity has no coherent meaning of its own but is given content by a range of extraneous political, social, and religious convictions for which the word itself functions as a mere receptacle. The variations in the use of the term “dignity” are undeniable. We can find dignity being invoked by advocates of flatly opposed moral positions. Where John Paul II, for example, believed that dignity requires the inviolability of all human life from the moment of conception to the expiration of all vital functions, the well-known Swiss organization Dignitas is famous for assisting those who wish to “die with dignity” to end their own lives. The Catholic Church claims that its affirmation of the dignity of every human being is compatible with its teaching that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.” Dignity USA, on the other hand, is an organization that, in its own words, “envisions and works for a time when Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Catholics are affirmed and experience dignity through the integration of their spirituality with their sexuality, and as beloved persons of God participate fully in all aspects of life within the Church and Society.”

Or consider the case of Ms. Geisy Arruda. As reported by the BBC, Ms. Arruda, a student at Bandeirante University in Sao Paolo, “provoked jeers and insults” from her fellow students when she attended class in a very short red dress. She was expelled from the university for showing “a flagrant lack of respect for ethical principles, academic dignity and morality.” The university reversed its decision, however, after much media publicity, and Ms. Arruda’s lawyers brought a case for damages to compensate for her, as they put it, “trampled dignity.”

The interesting question, then, is not: are the uses of “dignity” variable?—who could deny it?—but why is this so? If the meaning of a term is confusing simply because the ideas motivating it are complex, that should not deter philosophers, should it? Isn’t the clarification of confusion (at least an important part of) our proper business? I am going to show that there are indeed systematic reasons behind the different (and often opposed) uses of the term. To untangle the idea of dignity, the best way, I think, is to reach back to its roots, and these—like all concepts of significant interest in political life—are historical. But before I do that, let me say a little more about my project in this book.

In the rest of this chapter, I shall trace some of the different senses in which the term has been used. One very common way in which writers present the history of dignity is as part of what I call an “expanding circle” narrative. From this perspective, the quality of dignity, once the property of a social elite, has, like the idea of rights, been extended outward and downward until it has come to apply to all human beings. This is all part of that great, long process by which the fundamental equality of human beings has come to be generally accepted. There is something right (and appealing) about this picture, yet what it leaves out is also important if we want to understand how the word “dignity” is used nowadays—and why it is the source of so much disagreement. History shows the existence of significant distinct strands in the meaning of dignity, strands that come together and move apart at different times. An important feature of this history, but one that is hard to square with the expanding-circle narrative, is that dignity has not always been seen as something that is restricted to human beings alone—whether to human beings as such or some special, elite group of them. Another is that in the nineteenth century the Catholic Church used the term “dignity” as part of a fiercely anti-egalitarian discourse. The fact that the idea of human dignity should later have come to be associated in Catholic thinking, as elsewhere, with equality and human rights represents a sharp, important (and, to my mind, very welcome) intellectual change, not just a further step along a long, straight road to democracy.

The second chapter looks at some ways in which “dignity” has been used in recent legal discourse. Encouraged by the kind of statements that figure so prominently in the Universal Declaration and the Grundgesetz, there is a natural tendency to imagine dignity as an “inner, transcendental kernel”—something intangible that all human beings carry inalienably inside them that underlies the moral claims that they have just by being human (and that states have the duty to uphold). If this is what dignity is supposed to be, it isn’t surprising that so many philosophers are so tetchy about it. Of course, Kantians and Catholics do have accounts of what this inner, transcendental kernel amounts to—but they involve wider, metaphysical commitments that (to put it mildly) not everyone will accept. Moreover, attempts to apply this foundational conception of dignity in practice (in Germany, for example) fall short, so far as I can see, of showing the kind of cogent route from principle to application that we would hope for. In fact, I shall give reasons to think that legal decisions allegedly based on this inner transcendental kernel are given substance by the importation of one or more of the other senses of “dignity” (for example, that of behaving in a dignified way or being treated in a way that expresses respect for one’s humanity) that I will distinguish in this first chapter.

Finally, the idea that dignity involves the expression of respect for the value of humanity raises a philosophical puzzle that is (or so I believe) of great interest, depth, and importance. Why should we have a duty to express respect for humanity when no one is benefited by our fulfillment of that duty—something that at least seems to be the case when we treat the dead “with dignity”? In Chapter 3, I shall propose a very radical solution to that puzzle, one that advocates an approach to ethics that is quite different from those that dominate current thinking on the subject.

A theme that runs through all three chapters is how best to understand Kant’s view of dignity (and with good reason—my initial response to McCrudden wasn’t wholly wrong, I think). Kant played an important role historically in connecting dignity with the idea of all human beings having unconditional, intrinsic value, and it is by reference to Kant (particularly his famous statement that human beings should always be treated as ends and never as means only) that attempts have been made to turn the principle of respect for dignity into practical moral and legal decisions, so there is no way round him if we want to understand the history of the term, its conceptual structure, and its application. What is more, I shall argue that Kant’s moral philosophy, when properly understood, actually represents a challenge to a currently ruling orthodoxy about the nature of morality that makes the puzzle of Chapter 3 so difficult to resolve. I don’t myself think that that means that we should accept Kant’s “Platonism” (as I shall call it) about morality, but the independent place it gives to the idea of moral duty seems very persuasive to me (and, if all goes well, when I have finished, I hope, to you too).

II. Cicero and After

Historical phenomena rarely derive from a single source, bubbling up out of the ground like the spring at the start of a river, and so it is with “dignity.” “Dignity” originated as a concept that denoted high social status and the honors and respectful treatment that are due to someone who occupied that position. Terms to express similar conceptions exist in most languages, including ancient ones. Kind informants have told me that such terms exist in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and Persian, for example. There are four uses of “dignity” in the King James translation of the Hebrew Bible, although they render three different Hebrew words. All three apparently also contain the sense of “elevation” or “majesty.” Interestingly, however, in modern Ivrit, I am told, the preferred term for dignity is not one of these status-related words but “B’Tselem,” which comes from Genesis 1:27 (“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him,” in the King James translation). B’Tselem is also the name of an admirable human rights organization: the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.

Yet even in its very early stages, the idea of dignity in the Wes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• References and Abbreviations
• 1. “The Shibboleth of All Empty-Headed Moralists”
• 2. The Legislation of Dignity
• 3. Duty to Humanity
• Notes
• Index