In Western society, the idea of human dignity is precious. Understood as something like the inherent or unearned worth that all humans share equally, human dignity is typically treated as the moral basis of human rights. For the same reason, it usually stands as a limit of reasonable disagreement—that is, as a limit to what we think we should tolerate in disagreements with others about the good, the right, or the just; rejecting the idea of human dignity is beyond the pale.
Human dignity also calls us to action with distinctive urgency. We protest fiercely when we think human dignity under fundamental threat.
We weep to hear news that it has been trampled, mocked, or violated. And we cringe whenever we think ourselves complicit in its injury, even indirectly, as would be true, say, if we learn that our soldiers have tortured their prisoners or that a political leader we voted for has racist sympathies.
Ditto for the US Constitution. These facts thus set up a two-pronged question. A few years ago, I set out to answer these questions.
Working with a variety of scholars, I eventually compiled the first dedicated historical treatment. So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.
He writes:. And so, voila! As he argues, our «central interests» in such a self can equally account for the widespread belief that no person ought to be treated at odds with this interest.
Presumably this is because our ability to express a self-conception belongs to the category of attributes «which are the subject of our most humane concern with ourselves and the source of what we regard as most important and most problematical in our lives», as Harry Frankfurt puts it Regardless of which of our properties are mentioned to explain why human beings have dignity, they usually are tightly connected to the attributes Frankfurt writes about.
So, no wonder that critics of Sangiovanni have pointed out that he is not so much in the business of replacing human dignity but rather offers his own favoured conception of it What makes one a bearer of human dignity is the subject of an endless dispute, and one standard explanation for this is that many of the standard proposals have notorious difficulties in securing dignity as an inherent value, i.
No matter whether we conceive of human dignity as grounded in the capacity for self-awareness, or autonomy, or reason — all of these suggestions seem to be subject to the worry that they exclude a significant part of the human population, namely those that do not appear to possess the capacity in question. Grounding human dignity more broadly in a feature which we already considered as a plausible conferrer of inherent value — the capacity for sentience — is of no help either, since identifying human dignity with this value seems to lead to absurd consequences regarding the range of dignity bearers and the norms that would equally apply to all of them.
Although there are some in the debate on animal rights and moral status that think we should get rid of the notion of a single moral value inherent in all and only human beings altogether 31 , no contemporary author in environmental ethics seems to defend the radical thesis that all sentient beings should be treated equally in the sense that there is no reason to prefer human beings over non-human life forms in standard circumstances.
Again, pointing to paradigm cases of dignity violations may provide a quick answer. Merely talking about «murder» in these circumstances, true as it may be, is obviously a massive understatement of what happened. But this kind of respect that Stephen Darwall and others call «recognition respect» 32 is precisely what is justified by appealing to the dignity of the human being. But it has proven to be rather difficult to spell out in detail what «basic moral equality» refers to without getting into dignity-talk.
For it seems clear that we are allowed to treat our fellow human beings unequally in many respects without getting anywhere near morally wronging them, let alone committing a dignity violation: There is in general nothing problematic about buying a beer for one of my two colleagues but not the other, just because I like one of them more, or because I think only one deserves a free round but not the other.
Specifying the ways in which we ought to behave towards others in order to preserve their basic moral equality, on the other hand, is typically achieved by citing examples of specific moral misdeeds that are drastic enough to make it natural to group them into the category of dignity violations.
So again, it comes as no surprise that talk about basic moral equality and talk about human dignity often go hand in hand As many have pointed out, this hardly covers the whole of dignity violations: For instance, cases like the one above where people are killed because they are simply regarded as «unworthy life» are not examples of a murder for the sake of something else. And showing people that they do not count is degrading in the sense that they are given a lesser status than they deserve.
An analogous example would be a case where I pay my respects to a father in order to increase my chances to get his consent for marrying his daughter: Although the object of my respectful behaviour is the father, and not his capacity to grant me to wed his child, he is not the person who is really of interest to me; in fact, I may not care for him at all, but merely regard him as an obstacle that has to be overcome in order to get what I really want.
But if this is indeed the only source of my respect for him, surely my attitude would be morally problematical, to say the least. But what about alternative 2? Maybe in the end, all three value characteristics must be attributed to three different normative properties?
A golden brooch I inherit from my grandmother may possess instrumental value — I can sell it to buy something else — as well as some sort of inherent value: Its specific history makes it emotionally valuable to me.
Are there three different normative properties called «human dignity», with different value characteristics? I think the answer is no, for the following reason: The norms that can be justified by appealing to human dignity do in fact not change or are modified when we consider them from the particular perspective of one of the three value characteristics in a given paradigmatic example for a dignity violation, and then switch to another characteristic.
The prohibition to humiliate people, for instance, if we regard it as absolute in the sense explained above, does not deliver different results depending on the capacities a possible victim has developed, capacities that grant their bearers different degrees of attributive goodness; we are not allowed to torture healthy adults, and the same goes for babies and severely demented persons.
And surely this makes a difference with respect to the graveness of the wrong committed? Consider a comatose person as a drastic example. That she will not be able to recognize what is done to her strikes me as no different from a case where someone merely factually does not realize that they are humiliated. In this case, it is hard to believe that the norm in question should be absolute — that the norm to make other people happier by applying this norm can only be overridden to prevent catastrophic scenarios.
If this norm is absolute at all, then only to respect entities which have final value — such as people as the bearers of human dignity. Again, this might be put into question: Reinhard Merkel has argued that some human beings, such as people in a persistent vegitative state, do possess human dignity, but that important absolute norms like the right to life which are justified by that value strictly speaking protect not them, but «also and even primarily the general prohibition of killing as one of the fundamental norms of ethics and law» In other words, the prohibition to kill persons in a PVS does not serve their interest for they have none, according to Merkel but our interest in a stable moral and legal system.
Hence, Merkel does not deny that every bearer of inherent human dignity is also of final value. On the other hand, even if I am in desperate need for money, the emotional value of the brooch will always act against selling it by providing me with a pro tanto reason to keep it.
Since the two value characteristics are connected to norms that guide the agent in opposite directions, we have decisive reason to assume that the underlying values cannot be the same: Leaving aside the question of ontological priority, it seems safe to say that norms and values are at least epistemologically bound together 39 : My recognition of the presence of a value has to be spelled out in terms of certain norms that will guide my behaviour, at least when certain background conditions are fulfilled.
The beauty of the Mona Lisa, for example, will give me a pro tanto reason to pay the painting a visit if I happen to be in Paris, and it is difficult to tell what it means to understand that something is valuable if I do not even have the slightest idea what this implies for my behaviour.
Given this relationship between values and norms, if we are confronted with something valuable whose norms point to contradictory acts, it remains unclear what single value might underlie them. Since the uniformity of the value characteristics of human dignity cannot be secured by means of a conceptual entanglement existing between them, the most promising explanation points to the property or properties in virtue of which human beings have dignity.
These either might be further normative properties, or else be non-normative properties, or a mix of both. As we have seen in section 4, to identify the right set of grounding properties already proves to be a difficult task even with respect to the value characteristic of inherence; and to provide a successful account that is able to explain the simultaneous occurrence of all three value characteristics in the evaluative property of human dignity is even more challenging and remains an object for further research.
That human dignity equally inheres in its bearers no matter how these fare in terms of the kinds of attributive goodness ascribable to them means that none of its individual bearers can be willfully ignored in favour of other entities who do not possess it, regardless of how much excellence they exhibit on their own terms.
What is more, since these bearers of inherent dignity are simultaneously the bearers of a final value, they always have to be respected for their own sake. Still, as the focus on paradigmatic examples of human dignity violations has shown, the actual space left for our obligations toward the non-human entities that constitute our environment is considerably smaller: Arguably we are not allowed to let something like T4 happen in order to prevent the extinction of a species of mammals that do not qualify as human dignity bearers, even if that species is in itself considered to be absolutely, inherently, and finally valuable Furthermore, a second important value we encountered that enjoys widespread support within environmental ethics — the final and inherent value of sentient beings — was considered not to be absolutely valuable, which explains why it cannot outweigh human dignity violations in virtually all conflict cases.
These findings might explain why the strength of our responsibilities toward the environment is significantly shaped not only by considerations of the moral status of the entities that populate it, but also by reflections about the moral status of the entities that occupy the centre of interpersonal morality: human beings.
As this paper has shown, the value that forms a crucial part of this moral status indeed has characteristics that mark it as possibly unique and hard to be outweighed by conflicting normative considerations Arneson, R. Steinhoff ed. Darwall, S. Marcus, J, Braarvig, R. Brownsword, D. Dworkin, R. Finnis, J. Fitzpatrick, W. Muders ed. Lee, P. Galeotti, A. Gesang, B. Gewirth, A. Haber ed. Honneth, A. Kant, I. This is obviously a very difficult issue, and one that continues to be both brought before the courts and debated.
Campaigners both for and against assisted suicide argue that dignity is on their side. For other rights, such as the right to health , dignity is something that we want to help people achieve. We ensure people have basic rights to so that they are able to lead a dignified life. The idea of dignity is fundamental to how we regard ourselves. We do this through human rights. He has previously worked in the public law department of a legal aid law firm, assisting victims of trafficking, and is now working for Transform Drug Policy Foundation.
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