The revisionist account of human dignity elaborated here is modeled loosely on the value-theory that Marx developed to analyze capitalism and its “intentionality” (in the sense described at the end of Chapter 9). The object of this chapter is to describe relevant aspects of that theory and motivate my claim that dignitarians can and should emulate it. I stress that using Marx’s analysis as a prototype in this manner does not require his general account of capitalism to be sound. Although I do in fact believe that Marx’s approach is on the right lines, for present purposes nothing turns on that truth of that belief. Even if it gives a poor account of commodity-value, I contend that Marx’s analysis can still provide a useful template for explaining how “human dignity” can represent the value and people and their lives without having to rely on the traditionalist assumptions rejected in the first half of this book. It exemplifies the right kind of analysis, one that dignity-revisionists can fruitfully appropriate for their own purposes. Later, I explain more fully why I think Marx’s approach is propitious in this regard.

Returning to where we began, consider again B. F. Skinner’s withering dismissal of the “autonomous … inner man, the homunculus, the possessing demon, the man defended by the literatures of freedom and dignity.” Like Skinner, this book has urged that we “dispossess” individuals of dignity understood as an innate, occult, inward, quality, or as a fixed juridical status that remains unchanged regardless of how the lives of its bearers actually work out. Yet, where Skinner sought to exorcise dignitarian considerations entirely in order to make room for a program of technocratic social reform, this book has instead tried to reappropriate a revised construal of human dignity as a valid basis for social and political criticism. The revisionist strategy recommended here has accordingly sought to conceptualize human dignity as an external social phenomenon, entrenched (or not) in actual patterns of social interaction, in something like the way that Hobbes and other early theorists of the modern state attempted to construct an account of that institution as the central locus of public concern.

This chapter paints a composite portrait of the leading features of what I call dignitarian humanism. I again stress that there is in fact no single doctrine to which this label refers, still less any canonical understanding of how central dignitarian commitments fit together. For the time being, however, I make the artificial assumption that we can recover the view of a representative “dignitarian humanist” whose position we are seeking to sympathetically reconstruct but critically assess. As the argument proceeds, and we tease out those aspects of dignitarian consciousness that are worth keeping while dropping others, my hope is that we will wind up with a compelling dignitarian view that does have a genuine doctrinal integrity.

The various different construals of individual dignity discussed in Chapters 5 and 6 share a common feature. They all interpret dignity possessively, as rooted within the individual person – whether in the form of an existential attribute, an identity, an “inherent worth,” or a bundle of important capacities (rationality, autonomy, ability to pursue projects, etc.). The implicit conception is gravitational, with the overriding force of dignitarian considerations emanating from something localized to individuals considered as such. We saw that despite its endorsement of a relational view of dignity, even Kant’s theory shares something of this centripetal character. For although he theorized moral dignity as the management of a struggle between antagonists, Kant internalized that conflict to the self. Hence, in Kant’s view, the struggle for dignity and self-respect is finally an intimate one, played out within agents’ deliberative self-consciousness.

So far, this book has said a great deal about what human dignity is not, or, at any rate, how we shouldn’t think about it. I have denied that it is helpfully construed as an inherent possession of the person, an inward attribute revealed in conscious introspection, an existential identity or uniqueness, a quasi-juridical status, a form of authority or personal sovereignty, a generic “purposiveness,” or an inalienable quality that never changes. If human dignity is none of these things, then what would a more compelling conceptualization of it look like? Is any cogent and politically useful account of human dignity left?

According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, recognizing “the inherent dignity and … the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” This statement expresses what we can call the traditional view of human dignity, according to which “dignity” inheres in personality and grounds inalienable entitlements to be treated with respect. Recast in timanthropic terms, this view implies that human dignity is a kind of intrinsic worth

The second half of this book attempts to reconstruct an alternative account of human dignity and to evaluate how far its critical credentials in political reflection can be vindicated. The account I will offer is revisionary in that it drops any presumption that human dignity is a preset value standing apart from the transactions and routines of everyday life. It aims to liberate the central dignitarian intuition that all lives matter, and should be valued accordingly, from the two traditionalist mainstays rejected in earlier chapters: on the one hand, the assumption that human dignity is immutably possessed by persons; and on the other, that it consists in an idealized relation of equality defining a kind of dignitarian kallipolis like Kant’s “kingdom of ends.” Instead, the revisionist proposes that human dignity is a transient, vulnerable, and socially extended quality whose emergence depends on the character of concrete, organized, interaction under actually existing regimes.