WHAT IS DIGNITY?

Dignity has two senses.

In the most familiar sense, it’s about how we comport ourselves.

We will often assert that some people exhibit a sense of dignity in their physical bearing (in their expression, their posture, their clothes), and we are all subject occasionally to undignified moments. The second sense of the term – which we employ here – derives from Western moral philosophy and numerous other world-historical ethical systems whereby dignity is a universal attribute: all humans possess it at some level.

Dignity, in this sense, is a quality of being worthy of ethical consideration and respect.

WHY ARE HUMANS ENTITLED TO SPECIAL CONSIDERATION?

Why humans deserve special ethical consideration and respect is a matter of ongoing debate.

One of the major points of contention concerns the fact that some humans are profoundly immoral.

Haven’t such people foresworn any entitlement to be treated with dignity – notorious criminals, leaders who commit war crimes and genocide, for example?

And do we not actually deprive such people of human rights?

Prisoners, of course, lose their rights to privacy and freedom of movement (UDHR 12 and 13).

There are no easy rejoinders to these questions.

Human rights theorists nonetheless point out that the enumerated human rights such as those listed in the UDHR, have necessary limits as a way of accounting for the moral and philosophical problems inherent in human rights claims.

For its part, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights article 29 s.2 states that limits may be placed on rights if such limits are...

“determined by law.”and if they are “just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.”

Put another way. There is room for interpretation of the extent or reach of human rights so long as the determination of limits on how far they can go is legitimate.

This means that limits on human rights must be determined by law and sanctioned by the people to whom the rights and limits apply. Thus, an important philosophical distinction needs to be kept in mind that recognizes inherent dignity as a human being as compatible with legitimate (lawful) limits on human rights.

In other words, while it may be lawful to limit or suspend a person’s right(s) this does not deprive that person of their inherent dignity.

The very fact that a lawful process is necessary to limit or suspend such a right or rights is recognition of the person’s fundamental dignity.

To illustrate this point take the example of children.

While it is a human right to take part in government through voting (UDHR 21) no reasonable person would argue that a five-year old child should be entitled to do so.

This suspension (or limit) of a right does not diminish the child’s dignity.

Rather, there is a legitimate reason to suspend this right: five-year-olds do not have the capacity to comprehend political problems, and their care as minors are entrusted to adults; hence, their vote would be potentially detrimental to the community and potentially undemocratic, say, if a parent told them whom to vote for, giving that parent’s franchise unequal weight.

Another way of thinking about such a limit is that it is a human right held in abeyance or suspended temporarily in the best interest of the individual (the child) and the community.

So what is it about humans that sets us apart from other animals and the environment as worthy of special ethical consideration?

As with other problems in human rights, there is no easy answer to this question, and certainly not one that will satisfy each of us.

The conventional answer goes something like this:

Of all the creatures in the world, humans possess a greater rational intelligence, creativity, and capacity for ethical judgment.

On these scores, the thinking goes, we are special and therefore entitled to special ethical consideration.

This is not the last word on these issues, and there remains heated disagreement over these premises, but this argument nonetheless is a foundation stone for the human rights project.

HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS

Another critical rationale for affording a higher ethical consideration to human beings is the fact that we have a recorded history.

Our often violent and deeply unjust history has demanded that we develop human ethics that improves upon our treatment of each other.

It must be said that human cruelty and depravity are not the special purview of any time period.

Indeed such tragedies are part of our collective story across time and thus a crucial means by which we understand ourselves.

Historical experience has shown us the extent to which we act cruelly to people who are not like us, a form of behaviour that prompted intense reflection about human nature.

As early as the sixteenth century, for example, the Spanish theologian and colonizer Bartolome de las Casas raised ethical questions about the impact of Spanish colonialism on indigenous peoples and African slaves.

History is also a catalogue of unabated war and conflict.

In the late-eighteenth century, German philosopher Immanuel Kant condemned the terrible human impact of recurring cycles of war and violence in Europe and proposed a program for “perpetual peace.”

Kant’s ideas would become instrumental in influencing the founding of the League of Nations after WWI and the United Nations in the aftermath of WWII, and human rights thinkers would draw heavily on his moral philosophy for guidance.

Out of these and many other historical moments, the language and conceptual terrain of human rights emerged.

Revulsion at the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was instrumental in prompting growing recognition of the inherent dignity of all people.

It was in reaction to the inhumane degradation and cruelty of slavery in the United States that early use of terms such as “crimes against humanity” were first brought to bear.

Likewise, in response to the horrors of the Holocaust during WWII, the American lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” to describe the crime of targeting and annihilating identifiable human groupings.

Lemkin argued that the evidence before the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals following the war gave “full support to the concept of genocide.”