Dignity

• 1. Introduction

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  Dignity is the right of a person to be valued and respected for their own sake, and to be treated ethically. It is a word attested in English from the early 13th century, rooted in the Latin dignitas, meaning "worthiness" or "prestige", arriving by way of French dignite. Yet for all its age, this word resists definition. Philosophers, legal scholars, physicians, and theologians have each claimed it, and none has managed to pin it down.

  When the United Nations drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, dignity sat at the very center. Article 1 declares that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, endowed with reason and conscience, bound to act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood. That language was not accidental. It arrived in the immediate aftermath of Nazi and fascist atrocities, and the drafters of the world's constitutions and charters made dignity a cornerstone of the new postwar order.

  Yet as Edmund D. Pellegrino, the chairman of the United States President's Council on Bioethics, admitted in 2008, there is still no universal agreement on what the term human dignity actually means. How can a word so central to law, philosophy, and medicine remain so stubbornly undefined? That is the question this documentary will follow.

• 2. Roots and Etymology

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  Immanuel Kant, the philosopher of the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment, gave dignity its sharpest philosophical definition. He held that some things simply should not be discussed in terms of value. Value, Kant argued, is necessarily relative, because it depends on the judgment of a particular observer. But some things are not relative. They are, in his phrase, "ends in themselves". And Kant wrote plainly: "Morality, and humanity as capable of it, is that which alone has dignity."

  What Kant added to the tradition was crucial. His writings brought the concept of human dignity from relative obscurity in Western philosophy into a focal point. He tied it directly to free will: human dignity is related to human agency, to the ability of humans to choose their own actions. Without that freedom to choose, he implied, there is no dignity to speak of.

  Before Kant, the Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola had already extended dignity in a different direction. In his "Oration on the Dignity of Man", Pico granted dignity not only to persons but to ideas and to beings broadly, speaking before hostile clerics about the dignity of the liberal arts and the dignity and glory of angels. That oration is commonly regarded as one of the central texts of the Renaissance, closely tied to the growth of humanist philosophies.

• 3. How Dignity Is Violated

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  Schachter, a scholar of human rights, once observed that a violation of human dignity can be recognized even when the abstract term cannot be defined: "I know it when I see it even if I cannot tell you what it is." That intuition maps onto four recognized categories of violation.

  The first is humiliation: acts that diminish the self-worth of a person or a group. The etymology of the word "humiliation" in all languages involves a downward spatial orientation, where something or someone is pushed down and forcefully held there. Courts and judges regularly use this framing, treating injuries to self-worth and self-esteem as the core harm.

  The second is instrumentalization, or objectification, treating a person as a means to achieve some other goal rather than as an end in themselves. This builds directly on Kant's moral imperative.

  The third is degradation: acts that, even when done by consent, convey a message that diminishes the importance of all human beings. Selling oneself into slavery, or a state authority deliberately placing prisoners in inhuman living conditions, falls into this category regardless of subjective feelings involved.

  The fourth is dehumanization, which strips a person or group of their human characteristics by describing or treating them as animals or as a lower class of human beings. This has occurred in genocides such as the Holocaust and in Rwanda, where minority groups were compared to insects.

  Practical examples span a wide range. Torture, rape, social exclusion, labor exploitation, bonded labor, and slavery all qualify. About 1 billion people worldwide lack access to toilets and are left with no choice but to defecate in the open, a situation the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations declared an affront to personal dignity. In India, the practice of employing people, usually from lower castes and more often women than men, in "manual scavenging" of human excreta from unsanitary toilets has been identified as a violation. Pope Francis I has specifically cited female genital mutilation as a practice that violates human dignity.

• 4. Poverty as a Dignity Violation

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  Both absolute and relative poverty constitute violations of human dignity, though each works by a different mechanism. Absolute poverty is tied to overt exploitation and connected to humiliation; being forced, for instance, to eat food retrieved from other people's garbage. Even in the absence of such direct acts, dependence on others simply to stay alive is itself a violation.

  Relative poverty is subtler but no less real. The cumulative experience of being unable to afford the same clothes, entertainment, social events, or education as others in that society produces subtle humiliation, social rejection, marginalization, and ultimately a diminished self-respect.

  Alan Gewirth, a philosopher of the late 20th century whose views on dignity are often compared with Kant's, sharpened this point. Like Kant, Gewirth theorized that dignity arises from human agency. But where Kant focused primarily on avoiding harm, Gewirth went further: he argued for positive obligations, the moral requirement not only to refrain from harming but to actively assist one another in achieving and maintaining a state of well-being. Poverty, on this view, is not merely an economic fact but a moral failure that falls on everyone.

• 5. Religious Traditions

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  The Catechism of the Catholic Church grounds human dignity in the belief that every person is created in the image and likeness of God. This dignity, the Church teaches, does not spring from agency or free will, distinguishing the Catholic position directly from Kant's. It comes instead from the love of the Creator, and was further elevated by the incarnation and resurrection of Christ. The Church insists that all people possess equal dignity regardless of their living conditions or qualities, and it extends this concern to animals: "it is contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly."

  In Judaism, dignity appears under the concept of kevod ha-beriyot. The Talmud cautions against giving charity publicly rather than privately, specifically to protect the dignity of the recipient. The medieval philosopher Maimonides, in his codification of Halakha, warned judges to preserve the self-respect of those who came before them: "Let not human dignity be light in his eyes; for the respect due to man supersedes a negative rabbinical command."

  In Islam, figures such as Noah, Abraham, Joseph, David, Moses, Mary, Jesus, and Muhammad are presented in the Quran as role models of dignity precisely because they did not abandon their self-respect under social pressure. Mohammad-Ali Taskhiri, head of the Islamic Culture and Communications Organization in Iran, wrote in 1994 that dignity is a state to which all humans have equal potential, but which can only be actualized through a life pleasing to God. The 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam holds that "True faith is the guarantee for enhancing such dignity along the path to human perfection."

  In Buddhism, dignity is rooted in the idea that all people can choose the path of self-perfection. The state of fully developed courage, wisdom, and compassion is described as Buddhahood or enlightenment. The concept, especially in the Mahayana tradition, holds that all living beings possess Buddha nature, making the potential for this dignity universal.

• 6. Dignity in Law and Medicine

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  Germany offers the most far-reaching legal embedding of dignity in constitutional law. Article 1, paragraph 1 of the German constitution reads: "Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority." Dignity is placed even before the right to life, and its influence runs from serious criminal law down to decisions that might seem trivial.

  A 1977 decision by the German Federal Constitutional Court held that life imprisonment without any possibility of parole was unconstitutional as a violation of human dignity. Today, a prisoner serving a life term may apply for parole on the basis of good behavior as early as 15 years after incarceration. A provision in the Luftsicherheitsgesetz that would have permitted the Bundeswehr to shoot down an airliner being used as a weapon by terrorists was struck down mainly on dignity grounds: the court held that killing a small number of innocent people to save a larger number treated dignity as a measurable and limited quantity, which the constitution does not allow.

  In medicine, the issue became acute during the 20th century. The World Medical Association's Declaration of Helsinki, issued in June 1964, obligates physicians who participate in medical research to protect the dignity, health, integrity, and right to self-determination of research subjects. At Oviedo on the 4th of April 1997, the Council of Europe approved the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with regard to the Application of Biology and Medicine. The following year, the UNESCO Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights warned that treating a person to remove a genetic defect could be "contrary to human dignity", and stated that it is "the very dignity of the human race which is at stake" when germ-line treatment becomes possible.

  Canada, Denmark, France, Portugal, Sweden, and South Africa have each enacted legislation or constitutional provisions anchoring policy to dignity. The Constitution of South Africa, for example, names "human dignity, the achievement of equality and the advancement of human rights and freedoms" as one of the founding values of the state, and section 10 states that "Everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected." Switzerland has taken the concept furthest into the natural world: its constitution requires the state to take account of "the dignity of living beings" when legislating on reproductive and genetic material, leading the Federal Ethics Commission on Non-Human Biotechnology to publish, in 2008, a report titled "The dignity of living beings with regard to plants."

• 7. An Essentially Contested Concept

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  Philippe-Andre Rodriguez has argued that human dignity is best understood as an essentially contested concept. As he puts it, "it seems that it is this very nature of the concept that has allowed, on the one hand, human rights to receive such international acceptance as a theoretical enterprise and, on the other hand, has led the concept to be constantly challenged by different cultures worldwide."

  Karl Marx's relationship with dignity was contradictory. He wrote positively about it in his early work and suggested it could underpin his theory of alienation. Yet he elsewhere rejected the view that humans have a right to dignity, and argued that moral norms could not form the basis of a critique of capitalism because they belong to what he called society's ideological superstructure. The philosopher Somogy Varga reads Marx's account as a critique of Kantian ethics: imagining moral values as transhistorical, valid across all times and places, is unjustifiable for Marx, because values emerge from historical processes and social practices.

  Dan Egonsson and Roger Wertheimer pressed the question of what dignity actually requires of its holder. Egonsson proposed that an entity must be both human and alive to merit dignity. Wertheimer went further, arguing that it is "not a definitional truth that human beings have human status." Arthur Schopenhauer offered a bleaker reading still: dignity, for Schopenhauer, is simply the opinion of others about a person's worth, and the subjective definition of dignity is nothing more than fear of that opinion.

  The Mortimer Adler answer to this tangle was grounded in distinction rather than agency. Adler wrote that the only sense in which all human beings are equal is that they are equally distinct from animals. "The dignity of man," he said, "is the dignity of the human being as a person, a dignity that is not possessed by things." Failure to recognize that distinction, Adler held, challenges the very right of humans to equal dignity and equal treatment, a challenge with consequences still visible in every legal and political dispute the word enters.