Abstract
This paper focuses on a distinct puzzle for understanding the relationship between dignity and human rights. The puzzle is that dignity appears to enter human rights theory in two distinct roles: on the one hand, dignity is commonly pointed to as the foundation of human rights, i.e. that in virtue of which we have human rights. On the other hand, dignity is commonly pointed to as that which is at risk in a subset of human rights, paradigmatically torture. But how can dignity underpin all human rights, and yet only be at stake in very specific human rights violations? And if dignity is lost in torture, how can the tortured retain their human rights? In this paper I offer a solution to these puzzles, in the form of a new theory of dignity. On this new theory, an individual’s dignity can be constituted via either of two pathways: the agent’s own normative competencies, or the authority of her community. The former is what’s typically at stake in practices such as torture; it in virtue of the latter that we have human rights.
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Notes
Though see Beitz (2013) for a note of caution on how much we should read into the inclusion of dignity in these documents.
Another human right for which dignity is sometimes invoked in this role is the right to basic subsistence, which I address below.
My goals in this paper are thus relatively modest. My primary goal is simply to explore what dignity would have to be like, such that it could adequately fulfil both of these roles. I make no claim to be defending the theory of dignity that emerges as the correct/best foundation for human rights, though I do think such an argument could be made.
The idea that dignity might be a conferred status, rather than an inherent feature, has strong echoes with Colin Bird’s recent (2014) proposal that dignity be seen as ‘abroad amongst persons’, rather than inherent in them; as well as with Jeremy Waldron’s (2012) claim that dignity is a status conferred through law. It will be useful, then, to identify at the outset the key differences between the concept of social dignity that I am proposing here, and the concepts of dignity that Bird and Waldron have articulated. For Bird, dignity is “conferred by respect-displaying conduct (p.173)”, and is “a result of the respect that [persons] receive from each other (p.160)”. In other words, for Bird, an individual’s dignity is constituted by respect. On my view, by contrast, respect has a secondary role: dignity commands respect, and can be violated through disrespect, but dignity is not necessarily constituted by respect. Rather, an individual’s dignity is constituted by being subject to normative standards. For Waldron, by contrast, dignity is constituted through the legal norms constraining how we are to be treated. My view is closer to Waldron’s, in that I also see one aspect of dignity (i.e. social dignity) as constituted through social norms. However, I take legal norms to be only one form that such norms can take; on my account, most of the work is done by informal social norms. Moreover, I take social dignity to be constituted through norms constraining members’ behaviour and comportment, as opposed to norms constraining others’ treatment of them.
This is not a particularly novel objection. (See, i.e., Gould 2014).
This difficulty is paralleled in debates over what grounds egalitarian claims; that is, in virtue of what are persons equals? Just as for dignity, the problem is that there are strikingly few plausible features that all human beings in fact possess equally. See Carter (2011).
Some philosophers attempt a related strategy, which is to identify key features of human beings in general (such as rationality), and then attribute dignity to all human beings on the basis of membership in the species (see, i.e. George Kateb, Human Dignity (Harvard University Press, 2011), John Tasioulas, ‘Human Dignity and the Foundations of Human Rights’, Journal of International Law, 655 (2012), 724.) This strikes me as a very difficult maneuver to execute, since it remains unclear why mere species membership is meant to be sufficient to generate the required status. On the social construction model that I propose, by contrast, dignity is conferred through membership in the human community.
The conception of dignity sketched here derives from an earlier attempt to understand dignity, in Killmister (2010).
To recognise a standard involves both understanding the demands of that standard, and accepting its normative authority over one’s behaviour (it’s in virtue of this latter feature that we can say the standard is self-imposed). This means that an agent who unreflectively adopted a set of standards wholesale from an external authority would still have dignity, on this account, provided she took those standards to provide normative reasons for her.
Importantly, this only holds if the agent actually does take respect to be at stake in public urination.
See, for instance, the rapid response to Ruth Macklin’s claim that dignity is a useless concept., available at http://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1419/rapid-responses.
This is not to say that personal dignity violation is the only wrong of torture. The fact that torture hurts also matters morally; and, as we shall see below, an agent’s social dignity may also be violated through torture, which is an additional and distinct form of wrong. All I am claiming here is that the core wrong of torture, that which philosophers have attempted to explain in terms of dignity, concerns this conception of personal dignity.
Indeed, this ongoing recognition of violated standards goes some way to explain the psychological trauma victims continue to feel—particularly if, as Luban (2009) argues, they feel themselves to be complicit in the violation of those standards.
There is admittedly something slightly odd about such a case—the agent must take herself to be less worthy of her own respect because of the disrespect shown by another. However much we might think such an agent would be better off if she could decouple her sense of her own worth from the opinions of others, though, I take it to be relatively uncontroversial that many people do in fact take their self-respect to depend in part on how they are treated by others.
Some could see this as a reductio of the view—clearly, the individual’s dignity is violated under segregation, irrespective of the harmful norms she has internalized. If this theory doesn’t capture such dignity violations, it might be suggested, it cannot be an adequate theory of dignity. I agree, and such failures to recognize violations of dignity are precisely what motivates the supplementation of personal dignity with social dignity.
What counts as a dignitarian standard will necessarily be vague, on this account. This is because who counts as a member of the community is itself vague; as is the threshold at which an attitude comes to be held by ‘the community’.
It is also possible that forcing someone to contravene a social dignitarian standard expresses disrespect for the community as a whole, and hence violates the community’s dignity. For instance, it could be argued that some of the instances of torture undertaken at Abu Ghraib were violations of the Islamic community’s dignity, over and above the violations of personal and social dignity suffered directly by the victim, because of the blatant disregard those acts communicated towards the Islamic community’s standards. I suspect a plausible argument along these lines could be developed to defend the possibility of collective dignity, though doing so is beyond the scope of this paper. Even if it could, however, it would not undercut the harms to the individual victim that I identify here. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pushing me on this point.
It is important to be clear that membership in the biological category does not, by itself, carry any normative weight on this account. What matters is membership in the social kind, which being biologically human suffices for. It should also be stressed that the ‘we’ invoked here is not meant to suggest global unanimity. As with all social norms, I take the norms relevant to the construction of the human community, human dignity, and human rights, to depend on some participants more than others: those with more social power have a greater say in establishing them. As such, the fact that some individuals—even quite significant numbers—may reject these norms does not suffice to show that the norms do not exist, just as norms of etiquette do not cease to be norms just because some individuals refuse to accede to them.
But c.f. Moyne (2010).
It is crucial to stress that the foundation of human rights does not lie directly in these three features. In other words, I am not saying that we have human rights because we are moral equals, etc.; I am saying we have human rights as a downstream effect of having constituted the social kind ‘human’, which was done in part by the application of these three standards to all human beings. This point is important to avoid an objection raised by Charles Beitz (2009, p.227), namely that dignity “should not simply restate a value (or values) whose significance can be accounted for in terms independent of the idea of human dignity”. On my account, dignity does not simply give a label to values whose moral significance is entirely independent; rather, dignity is a morally significant status that is brought into existence by our application of these three standards to one another.
This is not to say that human rights violations are the only way to violate global social dignity. Were a powerful global institution to explicitly exclude certain categories of people from its realm of concern, for instance, that could potentially constitute a human dignity violation, on my account.
We are now in a position to clarify the two roles of dignity with respect to torture. Personal dignity picks out a core wrong of torture, which figures in the explanation of why freedom from torture has come to be accorded the status of human right. Now that it has that status, however, a victim’s human dignity is also at stake when she is tortured. Torture thus violates both personal and human dignity (and presumably various iterations of social dignity as well).
It is true that we could well have developed a conception of the global community that excluded some human beings, and it is also true that we may in the future go on to do so (just as it is true that we may in the future expand our conception of the global community to include some non-human animals). It does not follow from this contingency, though, that we are helpless in the face of denials of human rights, or silenced from critiquing practices that predate the emergence of this global community, and hence predate the emergence of human rights. There is still room to argue that we should have accorded people human rights well before actually did—not because all persons across all time inherently have human rights, but because there are sound moral reasons for conferring such rights.
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Killmister, S. Dignity, Torture, and Human Rights. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 19, 1087–1101 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-016-9725-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-016-9725-6