Introduction

One prominent meaning of the word ‘dignity’ is the value or worth possessed by all human beings in virtue of which they possess certain rights – human rights – such as the right not to be tortured for entertainment and the right not to be enslaved. Various political documents assert the reality of dignity so understood, the most famous of these being the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), which opens with the assertion that ‘recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world’.

My aim here is to sketch a secular account of dignity in this sense. The account is secular in that it does not entail or require the existence of God, though it is, as far as I can see, entirely consistent with the existence of God. Some claim that no such account is plausible. Nicholas Wolterstorff, for instance, declares that ‘it is impossible to develop a secular account of human dignity adequate for grounding human rights’ (2008, 325; see also Perry 1996 and Stackhouse 1998). A central task of any account of dignity is to identify dignity's ground or basis. As Wolterstorff notes, ‘Dignity is not something that just settles down here and there willy-nilly’ (2008, 319). Many attempts to identify dignity's basis fail on the grounds that the putative basis is not possessed by all human beings; three particularly challenging cases are infants, those with dementia and the severely cognitively impaired. Immanuel Kant is a popular punching bag here. Wolterstorff, for example, points out that the Kantian proposal that rational agency is the ground of human dignity founders on the fact that ‘some human beings […] do not have it – infants and those suffering from dementia, for example’ (329, emphasis original; see also Gilabert 2018, 127; Killmister 2017, 2066–69; Li 2019, 187–88; Schroeder 2012, 329–31; and Singer 2009, 573–74).

The secular account of dignity that I sketch here is pluralistic in that I identify three sources of human worth or value that can ground human rights. Some claim that dignity must be possessed to the same degree by all human beings (e.g. see Debes 2017, 1 and Kateb 2011, 5), but I see no good reason to accept such a claim.