The Concept of Dignity

November 30th, 2007

Views: 1171

Posted by ChrisG at 4:35 pm

Via Liberal Conspiracy, we learn of a slight spat between two of die Aufgeklärte, concerning the meaning, or meaninglessness, of human dignity. Ophelia Benson considers the very concept sentimental and without real application, noting that

I don’t consider humans to have much dignity. We’re too mortal, too fleshy, too fragile, too clumsy, too weak, too dim to have dignity.

She goes on to ask:

Is the idea that one has to find ‘human dignity’ a meaningful phrase in order to treat humans decently? If so, why would that be? What I think instead is that humans hate being shamed and humiliated, that in fact it is acutely painful for us, and that that is why it should not be done. Why isn’t that adequate?

In other words, if we accept that humans tend to avoid pain (and presumably, to seek pleasure), then we have all we need to understand what it is about humans that makes them morally considerable.

Meanwhile, Norman Geras responds with a defence of the concept, maintaining that human dignity is precisely what is undermined by the most egregious moral wrongs:

At Auschwitz and other death camps, the prisoners were made to stand out in the open completely naked, sometimes in freezing temperatures, assailed by biting winds, policed by armed guards with dogs and who had the power of life and death over them. This situation – described by one writer as a condition of ‘radical nakedness’ – is a paradigm case of what we call an assault on human dignity.

The key point he raises is that, through treatment such as this, something essential is being erased – and in order to perform this erasure, the basic humanity of the Auschwitz inmate is implicitly acknowledged, just so it can then be to be denied. This is why there is a difference between treating human beings like cattle (which is an affront to dignity) and treating them as cattle (which implies a Cthulhu-style indifference to human beings in general).

One thing we are saying is that the human worth of those prisoners in the camps was being denied. Making them stand naked and vulnerable in the circumstances I have described was a way of announcing that anything – anything at all – could be done to them.

So, if there are general standards according which we can judge how human beings can be degraded, then there is something about human beings which these refer to, and this attribute is dignity.

Leaving aside the point that Benson’s ‘absence of pain’ constitutes just the kind of general standard for measuring ‘degradation’ (=distance from the good) that Geras thinks we need a concept of dignity or intrinsic value in order to grasp, I think both approaches are entirely wrong, mainly because they do not grasp what is genuinely ethically considerable about human beings: their wellbeing, richly and relationally conceived.

The standard account of why dignity matters is given by Kant: the concept of something with value-in-itself, independent of any other end, is necessary for the possibility of morality in general. Such intrinsic value can only accrue to something with the capacity to set purposes for itself independently of its contingent interests, i.e. to an entity capable of following a rule for the rule’s sake alone. Consequently, only beings with this capacity (moral autonomy) can have intrinsic value. What it is to be human is to have this capacity, therefore human beings have intrinsic value, and transcend the scale of values against which particular goods (e.g. pleasure, safety, sustenance) etc. are weighed.

Now Geras responds to Benson by giving an account of how this concept of dignity becomes important. This occurs when one treats human beings as if they did not possess such dignity. Only then can we understand the nature of the harm done to them. But this fails to appreciate the nature of the wrong that is being done, and consequently looks to the wrong place for confirmation of what this wrong is committed against.

In the death camps, the wrongs committed against the prisoners were, firstly, wrongs performed through separation, through the promotion of betrayal, and through the isolation of individuals. The humiliations that Geras describes are a subset of those committed in the death camps, but the radical nakedness (Ruth Leys’ concept?) of which he writes is actually the nakedness of the individual who is solely individual – not the ‘bare life’ that remains after the autonomous citizen has been humiliated through forced abjection, but the individual whose vital connections to those around her have been violently severed, or which she has been forced to betray.

The sense of being ‘just an individual’ is at the heart of Tzvetan Todorov’s description of the effects of life in the death camps, and is one of the reasons he gives for why men fared so badly relative to women (both in terms of numbers surviving and in terms of psychological health). In fact, Todorov suggest that the men tended to effectively ‘collude’ with their violent atomisation by seeking to protect their dignity, this agalma or secret thing of value which defines them alone, from the humiliations which were heaped upon them. Withdrawal to the ‘last inch’ of oneself turned out to confirm and exacerbate the harm done.

Women, for their part, survived by building incremental connections with others, through small acts of care and solicitude, and tending to these relationships from hour to hour and from day to day. They sought to repair the wounds which the death camps were organised to inflict. The importance of such connections, the living substance of ethical life, is implicitly acknowledged by Geras himself in The Contract of Mutual Indifference, where atomisation is seen as the end result of a historical process which does not leave us many moral tools to work with.

This is the real problem with the concept of human dignity, and indeed with Benson’s naturalistic reduction of ethics: neither can form the basis of ethical considerability. They are instead both examples of tattered remnants of other historical versions of the concept of good. They are born out of crisis, but cannot provide a substantive replacement for what is lost, as neither is informed by an historical understanding of where it came from.

Consider Germany’s Basic Law or Grundgesetz. In the Federal Republic, the formulation of the Grundgesetz was a direct response to the Nazi years, and sought to refound the German state on the absolute rejection of the kinds of wrongs which Geras describes. Article 1.1 states:

Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar. Sie zu achten und zu schützen ist Verpflichtung aller staatlichen Gewalt.
[Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.]

From out of the experience of the Nazi era comes the desire to have done with such things once and for all, and to enshrine in place of the Nazi system the dignity of the individual as the keystone of a new world. But to do this is precisely not to do away with the Nazi era; in one sense it is to accept that, as Walter Benjamin said, ‘the enemy has not ceased to be victorious’. The individual qua individual is the object of the death camps, i.e. that which they were meant to produce, whether this individual is the Kantian obsessed with his dignity or Benson’s animalistic self shying away from kicks and blows. What really sustains the individual is the excess of him over himself, i.e. the affective relationships he is able to build, sustain, and expand despite the addiction to isolation that history has inscribed in him.

What we therefore need in order to understand what is ethically considerable about humans is a rich concept of their relatedness in space and in time, one which recognises that from their relationships springs their understanding of their good. Otherwise we operate only with what Hegel called the abstract universal, the Kantian ideal of dignity that is defined in opposition to everything particular – to all appetites and desires, but also to all the bonds that make our lives worth living. Instead, we need a concept of happiness as a concrete universal, that which becomes articulated, diversified and narratively unified through its appearance in the particular, in the ethical substance of our lives. Otherwise we are left only with an ‘ethics of the last inch’.