Whither Dignity?

In recent years, there has been a veritable explosion of scholarship on the topic of human dignity, reflected in numerous conferences (e.g. the 2019 IVR World Congress in Lucerne), monographs (e.g. Rosen 2012; Kateb 2014; Barak 2015) and edited collections (e.g. McCrudden 2013; Düwell et al. 2014; Debes 2017). Yet there is an amply justified concern that the modern human rights movement is losing steam, and one reason for this is scepticism about the very idea of human dignity that allegedly grounds these rights (Rosen 2013). Such scepticism is not new, of course. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) argued that rational beings are ‘elevated above any price’ by ‘an inner worth, i.e. dignity’ (2012 [1786], 4:434–4:435, 46, emphasis original). But Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) countered that the lofty phrase ‘dignity of man’ has merely served as ‘the shibboleth of […] perplexed and empty-headed moralists who concealed behind their expression their lack of any real basis of morals’ (1965 [1840], 100). Yet newer sources of scepticism are more surprising because they succeed the confident assertion, in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), of ‘the inherent dignity and […] the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family’ (United Nations 1948).

One problem, emphasized by John Tasioulas in his plenary address in Lucerne, is that dignity claims have been trivialized, and so we have lost track of the original vision adopted by the drafters of the UDHR. As Clint Curle explains in Volume II, the historical context of the UDHR is vital to understanding its approach to human dignity. Vivid in many people's memories were the Nazi programs of mass extermination, ‘barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind’ (United Nations 1948). So it is not surprising that the focus of the UDHR was securing the right never to endure such cruel and unusual treatment again. But many people in Western democracies in the twenty-first century have no memory of such atrocities, and dignity claims have now so proliferated that almost any human desire is asserted as a human right.