Keywords

1 Adequacy Conditions for a Politically Useful Notion of Human Dignity

Philosophical discourse about human dignity and human rights (cf. Düwell, 2014; Freedman, 2023; Hartogh, 2014) may appear somewhat quaint from a political point of view. Yet at second sight it has a bearing on a massively important political project, namely the justifiable globalization of human rights culture. The complex web of normative institutions we summarily call human rights culture would probably not hold together for long if its integrative normative ties were found to be untenable under rational scrutiny. An idea of human dignity pervades these integrative normative ties of human rights culture, as already the famous Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights indicates. And its preamble asserts that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” is declared to bear a foundational role for “freedom, justice and peace in the world”. If it is true that a defensible notion of human dignity is necessary for, or at least relevant to, the defensibility of declarations of human rights, then we advocates of human rights culture are well advised politically to clutch at every straw in critical philosophical discourse about alleged articulations of notions of human dignity.Footnote 1 In brief: “The problem of justification is central. The plausibility of any determination of the content of dignity is dependent on its theoretical justification. No conception of dignity will survive in morality and the law if no convincing reasons are at hand why dignity should be understood in this way and not another” (Mahlmann, 2013: 606). It seems advisable in this situation to postulate some conditions of adequacy for results of philosophical explanations of human dignity. The following four strike me as plausible responses to the challenges.

First, a viable explication should be refined, i.e. its explicans should not be presented as a brute fact nor as an unanalyzable intuition, as a reflection-repelling conviction, or as a sacred value that defies questioning in argumentative discourse.

Second, the explication should be realistic, i.e. it should not present human dignity as depending on ideals that most people with a decent amount of knowledge about the diversity of living conditions in our contemporary world would reject as unrealistic, lofty, or naïve.

Third, the explication should be relevant, i.e. its determinate normative content should make a difference in the ways we think about the validity-basis of human rights culture. Human rights culture is a powerful reality both in (morally and legally) normative terms as well as in terms of organized political power. Undoubtedly, how human rights culture fares has massive consequences for good or ill concerning the living conditions of countless people at present and in the future.

Finally, a viable explication should be reasonable, i.e. grounded in beliefs that are confidently available to everyone whom we would count as possessing sufficient common sense, sound critical self-reflection, and good will for dialogue on an equal footing, i.e. discourse. Formulating the latter condition of adequacy in discourse ethical parlance: discursive peers should be able to consent to the claim that the proposed explication of human dignity is reasonable.

Assuming that we need a refined, realistic, relevant, and reasonable account of human dignity—in short, an R4 account—does not Kant’s moral philosophy already provide such an account? A balanced answer will be in the negative. One reason for this is that, in Kant's ethical framework, dignity (of the humanity in each person) follows from the categorical imperative of the moral law (self-imposed by each person), not the other way around.Footnote 2

2 Dignity Semantics in Apel and Habermas

An R4-account of human dignity is a desideratum that sets the bar very high, perhaps too high. Apel and Habermas have elaborated two variants of discourse ethics which, notwithstanding their complex theoretical architectonics, have only weakly developed dignity semantics. It is not my aim in this chapter to expound and compare these two classic elaborations of discourse ethics.Footnote 3 My modest aim in the present section is to illuminate the central ambitions of both approaches in such a way as to make visible where approaches to a theory of human dignity are hinted at but remain undeveloped.

In the Apelian framework, the desideratum of a full-fledged discourse ethics would amount to a “macro-ethics of co-responsibility” (Apel, 1996b, 2000) spanning all communicatively connected moral agents. Consequently, Apel adumbrates as “the main problem of a discourse-ethics today” the “problem of organizing somehow the collective co-responsibility of all members of the human community of communications” (Apel, 1996b: 289) in order to cope with global problems that are such that how we fare in trying to handle them more or less successfully has a tremendously significant moral dimension. A case in point is the global problem of achieving a sustainable way of living under the pressure of environmental degradation and global warming. This challenge for humankind poses the risk of catastrophic failure with detrimental consequences for countless lifes, human and non-human. To the extent that such failure or success) would depend on failure or success in mobilizing and adequately organizing collective co-responsibility it has a moral dimension.

Apel is convinced that for handling global problems we need “a universally valid ethics for the whole of humankind; but this does not mean that we need an ethics that would prescribe a uniform style of the good life for all individuals or for all the different sociocultural forms of life. To the contrary: we can accept and even oblige ourselves to protect the pluralism of individual forms of life so long as it is guaranteed (warranted) that a universally valid ethics of equal rights and of equal co-responsibility for the solving of the common problems of humankind is respected in each single form of life” (Apel, 1996a, b, c: 284). Discourse ethics should be relevant in particular for two problems: For the macro-ethical problem of concern for global justice under conditions of living together in a de facto multicultural world society (Apel, 1997, 1998a) and for the macro-ethical problem of organizing co-responsibility in effective and at the same time morally integral forms in view of existential risks for the species and the continued existence of the terrestrian community of communication (Apel, 2000, 2001). Apel considers three functionally interconnected institutional achievements to be particularly valuable for coping with macro problems: Human rights, democratic forms of government, and the rule of law (Apel, 2007). Tangentially, but never systematically, he affirms the position that human dignity provides a moral foundation for human rights. Apel and Habermas think of the foundational relationship itself as a process of discursive consensus-building that leads to the “declaration” and further development of human rights. Apel does not consider in detail what the notion of human dignity might mean outside of its (presumed) foundational function for human rights (Hartogh, 2014), nor whether human rights might as well have been declared without reference to human dignity.

In Apel's opinion, the specifically foundational problem of a macroethics “refers to the question whether a postconventional, that is, a rational and universally valid, foundation of co-responsibility, that is of everybody's personal obligation to solidarity with humankind, can be given. For the conventional forms of co responsibility and solidarity which are restricted to small groups or, at best, to nations, will not suffice” (Apel, 1996b: 289). Apel's grand project in ethical theory is to develop a reasonable, refined, and relevant foundation for a small set of morally relevant requirements that all moral agents are bound to recognize as binding for moral agents in virtue of their capacity for participating in argumentative discourse.

Being communicatively connected (Sikka, 2012) by argumentative discourse is being communicatively connected in a very special way, since argumentative discourse consists in dialogical practices with a very peculiar normatively constitutive aim. The normatively constitutive aim of argumentative discourse proper is the settling of clashes of discrepant validity-judgments in ways that no one concerned can sensibly fault for arbitrariness, unjust partiality, and ignorance (Kettner, 2017). In Apel's and Habermas’ parlance, the constitutive aim of discourse is a “rational consensus”. Rational consensus is consensus rationalized, that is a consensus that eventually fixes claims of validity and is eventually grounded in reasons which no one who is co-responsible for the discursive construction of that consensus could not reasonably judge to be, and accept as being, sufficiently good reasons.

Strict reflection on normative presuppositions that are demonstrably (i.e. on pain of performative self-contradictions) necessary for the pursuit of the constitutive aim of argumentative discourse discloses to arguers that arguers ought to acknowledge all claims of all members of the communication community if their claims can be justified by rational arguments. This in conjunction with a substantial normative assumption about the nature of morality–that one should not unnecessarily sacrifice any finite, individual human interest–led Apel to formulate as the basic normative principle of (Apelian) discourse ethics that “all human needs—as potential claims—i.e. which can be reconciled with the needs of all the others by argumentation, must be made the concern of the communication community” (Apel, 1980: 277).

In the same vein Habermas later proclaimed as “the distinctive idea of an ethics of discourse” his “discourse principle” (D) that “only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the approval of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse” (Habermas, 1990: 66). In its most general reading, D suggests that the validity of norms for regulating ways of acting depends on consensus building among those who stand to be affected by those norms, provided their consensus building springs from exercising “their capacity as participants in a practical discourse” alone. Whether the capacity to participate in practical discourse has anything to do with an egalitarian notion of dignity is a question that neither Apel nor Habermas explores. This is somewhat surprising, because it is not self-evident why participants in discourse should treat each other as partners with respect, and why all should be worthy of this.

Apel makes no further theoretical use of dignity semantics except in his discussion of Hans Jonas, whose use of dignity-semantics draws on a theological subtext and arouses Apel's suspicion of value-conservatism (Apel, 1996c: 236). In contrast, Habermas makes ample use of the notion of human dignity in a serious of essays that deal critically with rapid technological progress in the field of human genetics and assisted reproduction. The most elaborate of these essays is “The future of Human Nature” (2003). In this important essay, Habermas argues that the foreseeable massive dissemination and normalization of new repro-genetic interventions might have detrimental consequences for how we understand, and should continue to understand, our moral agency: “Whether or not we may see ourselves as the responsible authors of our own life history and recognize one another as persons of “equal birth”, that is of equal dignity, is also dependent on how we see ourselves anthropologically as members of the species. May we consider the genetic self-transformation and self-optimization of the species as a way of increasing the autonomy of the individual? Or will it undermine our normative self-understanding as persons leading their own lives and showing one another equal respect?” (Habermas, 2003: 29).

More illuminating perhaps than the metaphorical allusion to birth (“equal birth”) is the following passage where Habermas (2003: 37) explains the meaning of the modern notion of human dignity genealogically as a process of abstraction: “The nature of the inhibitions we feel in dealing with human life before birth and after death, being hard to define, explains our choice of semantically broad terms. Even in its anonymous forms, human life possesses “dignity” and commands “respect.” The term of “dignity” comes to mind because it covers a broad semantic range only suggestive of the more specific term of “human dignity.” The semantics of “dignity” also include the traces of connotations which are much more obvious, due to the history of its premodern use, in the concept of “honor”–connotations, that is, of an ethos determined by social status. The dignity of the king was embodied in styles of thought and behavior belonging to a form of life entirely different from that of the wife or the bachelor, the workman or the executioner. Abstraction from these concrete manifestations of so many specific dignities became possible only with the advent of “human dignity” as something attached to the person as such.” Habermas reads human dignity as dignity of the human person. So much is clear. What it is about human persons that warrants ascriptions of dignity remains obscure.

Theoretically most explicit is section II, “Human dignity versus the dignity of human life”. Here, Habermas interprets human dignity in terms of his Theory of Communicative Action. Human dignity, he maintains, indicates a universal obligation to respect any person’s inviolability as a person: “The community of moral beings creating their own laws refers, in the language of rights and duties, to all matters in need of normative regulation; but only the members of this community can place one another under moral obligations and expect one another to conform to norms in their behavior. Animals benefit for their own sake from the moral duties which we are held to respect in our dealings with sentient creatures. Nevertheless, they do not belong to the universe of members who address intersubjectively accepted rules and orders to one another. “Human dignity,” as I would like to show, is in a strict moral and legal sense connected with this relational symmetry. It is not a property like intelligence or blue eyes, that one might “possess” by nature; it rather indicates the kind of “inviolability” which comes to have a significance only in interpersonal relations of mutual respect, in the egalitarian dealings among persons. I am not using “inviolability” [“Unantastbarkeit”] as a synonym for “not to be disposed over” [“Unverfügbarkeit”]” (Habermas, 2003: 33).

I will return later to what Habermas implies here. In the following, I try to make a strong case for a new reading of the idea of human dignity.

3 A Discourse-Ethical Explanation of Our Moral Notion of Human Dignity

It is safe to presuppose wide consensus about the conceptual fact that four negative characteristics (non-arbitrariness, non-particularizability, non-quantifiability, non-naturalizability) belong to the set of normative intuitions that support the modern moral notion of human dignity. Jointly they suffice to distinguish the modern understanding of human dignity from all pre-modern non-egalitarian and non-universal notions of dignity. I now want to construct an argument that explains the moral notion of human dignity ethically, more specifically, within the framework of discourse ethics. Within this framework it is possible to understand the modern notion of human dignity in a moral perspective as the paramount moral status. The sense in which this moral status is paramount includes that it is a presupposition for alternative construals of human dignity in other normative formats such as duties (moral or legal), norms (moral or legal), and principles (moral or legal).

3.1 The Discourse-Ethical Status Thesis

According to the discourse-ethical status thesis, the peculiarity of the moral status of human dignity lies in the fact that we understand this status as the comparatively highest-ranking moral status and cannot reasonably do otherwise. The status thesis maintains: Whatever aureole of meaning surrounds human dignity in political and theological rhetoric, the part that can be rationally explained is that it expresses a paramount moral status.

The thesis can be briefly stated thus: Having human dignity is the moral status that anyone acting as a “moral subject” by adopting a particular moral stance vis-à-vis others must give to oneself in particular and to generic moral subjects in general, as soon as moral agents understand that they are always already the “moral object” of other moral agents who enact moral responsibility according to their moral views.

The pivotal point in this understanding is realizing that one cannot escape being treated as a moral object owing to the fact that one’s own position as moral subject is a position within a community of moral agents. As a matter of existential necessity (or, as Apel says, as a “factual apriori”) one is communicatively connected within the community of one’s cultural peers generally for all practical purposes, and specifically for matters involving universal validity claims (e.g., the pursuit of truth and universalistic normative claims, e.g. doing justice to human rights) one is connected even beyond anyone’s particular cultural we-group to a “virtually unlimited community of communication” consisting of virtually all arguers.

This pithy formulation of the status thesis was only possible by relying on some technical terms. In order to fix their meaning, consider: When we speak of a moral agent, we speak of an individual fit to occupy both positions, that of a moral subject and that of a moral object. One is a moral subject as far as one actively enacts one’s perceived moral responsibility. One is a moral object as far as one is passively involved in, and concerned by, how moral subjects actively enact their perceived moral responsibility. Moral objects cannot exist if there are no moral subjects. For in order to be treated morally, there must be those who hold one another morally responsible in their interactions. A human child can be a moral object, e.g., for parents, and will usually also become a moral subject sooner or later in life.

For a reasonably wide concept of morality, we can summarily designate as a morality all rules and ideals of good and right ways of behavior recognized as right and as important amongst cultural peers. To a morality in this sense also belong the all convictions (“moral convictions”) that bring to the rules and ideals of a morality a reasonably respectable meaning, to justify them or if need be to revise and improve them. What is common to all moralities can be characterized as the capacity, typical for encultured human beings, to be able to take seriously, in a representative way (i.e. in lieu of others and on behalf of others), how their interactions, in whatever areas we hold human beings responsible for their behavior, affect themselves for good or ill and all others who count (i.e. who are recognized as having moral status). Note that there can be as many moralities as there are livable interpretations of the structure of this capacity, the capacity to be co-concerned.

The concept of a moral status makes sense in the following way: The moral status we attach to someone or something (an individual x, y, z) within a conception we share of what it means to enact our moral responsibility, determines the general sense in which individuals of this kind (kind X, Y, Z) normatively appear to us. With the moral status we give to x we determine a certain scope of moral significance that this object as this kind of object should have for us. The moral status of x is a property that is typical of x by virtue of which each of the objects having the property become objects worthy of moral consideration for us. By having moral status they become moral objects. In other words, a moral status can be thought of as a typical property such that if an individual x of kind X has it, gives us a prima facie good reason to take x appropriately into account in enactments of our moral responsibility.

Evidently we are familiar not only with one moral status but with many. To illustrate: Some people give the moral status of sanctity to a grandiose natural entity (e.g. to Ayers Rock) and consequently will declare it morally wrong to damage it. Some people give moral status to sentient animals and will consequently find it unjust to torture them for no good reason. Some people (Kantians) give moral status to beings endowed with a rationally autonomous will and consequently find it immoral to force them to the detriment of their rationally autonomous will. Since our understanding of moral status is inherently diverse, different statuses can overlap, thereby modifying or even trumping each other. (Is it morally impermissible to torture people because of the pain they must suffer, or because of the crunching of their rationally autonomous will, or both? If both, in what proportion?) This naturally raises the question whether there is a fundamental moral status without which all the others would amount to nothing, and which therefore should trump other statuses in case of conflict, whenever one particular status and its normative significance conflicted with it.

3.2 The Problem Human Dignity Solves

After these preparatory considerations, we can now go on to explain the notion of human dignity ethically. Suppose there is a reference problem that the status concept of human dignity solves. A reasonable candidate is the following structural problem concerning all moralities: How are we to mark out the anchor points of the highly elastic netof our moral considerations that support the net, no matter how in particular this net has been stretched out within the space of all conceivable moral subjects and moral objects? How does the fact that any and every morality must be upheld by moral agents find expression in our capacity for being co-concerned? The status concept of human dignity solves this problem in the most general, simplest, non-arbitrary and, in this sense, most reasonable way. The status human dignity plays a constitutive role in our moral thinking: It constitutes the moral realm in such a way that within it the moral actors occur in their turn, and as such, i.e. in their double role of active moral subjects and passive moral objects. The dignity in human dignity reserves a special status, a special position for moral agents as such in the moral realm.

Human dignity in the sense of the paramount moral status springs from our moral considerations becoming self-reflexive, disclosing its absolute origin, namely beings of a kind that can take morally into account anything at all. In other words: The dignity thus arising is the dignity of beings who are naturally or normally or typically moral status givers. The paramount moral status they take themselves to have is that of being able to give moral status. Still more briefly: In line with a discourse-ethical explanation of human dignity, the property that gives human moral actors the paramount moral status we call human dignity is the property of being able to give moral status.

3.3 Naturalistic and Normative Elements in the Notion of Human Dignity

Let us now take the explanation of the status thesis one step further. A status can, as said, be thought of as a typical property which singles out all so-and-so beings from all possible ones. Such singling out properties are called “sortals” because with their help we can sort out a subset among the elements of a total set. Can we determine a sortal which picks out of all possible beings exactly those which we have to think of as bearers of human dignity and to whom we should pay corresponding respect?

We already have important clues. The sortal term we are looking for must obviously contain a descriptive or naturalistic (for short: empirical) element and a normative one. A normative component, because we are dealing with a moral status. Every moral status has some normative content, which we can articulate in the form of permission sentences (and their negations). For example, the status of being sentient beings has for us the normative content that it is not permissible to torture such beings unless for good excusable reasons. The interrogative form that reveals normative content goes like this: What is to follow normatively from the fact that an individual x “has” human dignity status? Second, the human dignity sortal must have an empirical component, for whatever the justifiable normative content of the status is, we must be able to attribute it to all beings who, to our knowledge, are empirically identifiable as human beings. How we recognize those (the human beings) to whom we are to ascribe the normative status (human dignity), to this empirical question we also need an empirical answer. Today, natural sciences like biology and human genetics have the comparatively greatest epistemic authority for fixing the extension of homo sapiens as a natural kind term. It would be odd, however, to want to let biology fully dictate how we must and must not attribute the normative status human dignity since then our ongoing interpretation of its normative content would be enslaved by the empirical homo-sapiens characteristic provided by biology and other empirical sciences. After all, we do not want to use the concept of human dignity to do a service to biology. Rather, we appreciate whatever help biology can provide if difficult cases arise that call for readjusting our practices of attributing human dignity in order to keep them properly aligned with the normative content we take the notion of human dignity to have. Difficult cases may arise because our conventional repertoire of well-established reasons for attribution human dignity could lead to certain attributions of human dignity that some reasonable people would fault for being too narrow and exclusive, or conversely for being too wide and overly inclusive.

Fierce controversies about abortion and protection of life evince how dramatic such difficult cases can become. Many abortion opponents argue that human dignity necessarily implies protection of life and must be attributed to the fertilized ovum “from conception on”. Other difficult cases arise in connection with partly human chimeras created through genetic engineering (Ravelingien et al., 2011). There is also an incipient debate about ascribing dignity and consequently basic rights to artificial systems, e.g. advanced intelligent robots (Goecke et al., 2020). A spectacular charge of narrowness surrounds the question whether we should attribute human dignity, or quasi-human dignity, to certain animals, in particular to certain kinds of apes. Some animal rights activists and philosophers supporting their cause argue that we should attribute human dignity or a normative twin of human dignity at least to the Great Apes.Footnote 4 Opponents object that we should not since this would strain our well established practice of attributing human dignity beyond the bounds of sense provided by the normative content of a reasonable conception of human dignity.

If we want to keep our criteria for the attribution of human dignity appropriately aligned with our understanding of the rationally ascertainable normative content of human dignity we need to complement the non-normative homo sapience characteristic with a normative humanum characteristic. The latter should provide the grounds of justification for constituting an ascribable normative status having the normative content of human dignity whereas the homo sapiens characteristic provides reasons for attributing that status to particular individuals. If the fit between both types of reasons becomes problematic we must readjust them to one another, but sensibly under priority of the reasons provided by the humanum characteristic. Their predominance has the following rationale: How we evaluate reasons for attribution must ultimately be guided by the reasons that constitute for us the normative content of the status called human dignity, but how we evaluate constitutive reasons of that status cannot derive merely from consensus about the good reasons that justify for us how we attribute that status.

Let us get back now to the question of how our certainty that we ourselves have human dignity originates.

3.4 The Origin of Our Awareness of Having Human Dignity Ourselves

According to the status thesis, human dignity is an expression of the fact that we–human moral agents–grasp ourselves as the supporting elements in our morality. Having human dignity is a relation among moral agents of the species homo sapiens–the relation that arises when human moral agents realize in their thinking that they are all in the following respect: As human beings they all belong to a species whose members normally are or have been or will be moral agents. Once we take this generally ascertainable fact into account as an insight of self-reflexion, we finally get a plausible answer to the perplexing question about the reason for our certainty that we ourselves have human dignity here and now:

The thought that others were permitted to be wholly unconcerned about whether and what kind of moral object I am for them and how they treat me in consequence; the thought that I myself as a moral subject would not be important at all, is an unbearable thought, come to think of it.

Imagining ourselves participating in an argumentative discourse about whether others should be so permitted makes it clear that nobody could possibly give me a reason for accepting this unbearable thought, a reason that I myself would reasonably have to endorse as a good enough reason. By grasping the full significance of the unbearable thought, I already know enough to know that there can be no such reason. The source of my reason to find the unbearable thought unbearable is my confidence in the validity of the claim that the moral subjectivity that is indispensable for myself as a moral agent requires respect, thus must not count for nothing. Likewise for all moral agents like me since it would not make sense for me to understand myself as a solitary moral agent. It does make sense to understand myself as one among an indefinite number of others who are equal to me in that each one understands oneself as being a moral agent and per se also a moral subject. Hence, what I take to be the good enough reason (1) for which other moral agents should owe me recognition as a moral subject, I take at the same time as the good enough reason (2) for which I should owe other moral actors recognition as moral subjects, and as the good enough reason (3) for which we should owe each other reciprocal recognition as moral subjects.

Both my confidence in the validity of the claim that the moral subjectivity of moral agents requires appropriate recognition, and my consequent generalization of this confidence across an indefinitely open “we”, both these thoughts can be made explicit by way of suitable arguments within the context of discourse. However, neither thought can be generated merely within the context of discourse. Rather, such confidence is generated and rooted in more or less reliably and widely cultivated attitudes of appreciation of expressions of moral agency, in short, in a culture of human dignity. This culture is in today’s world part of the emerging culture of human rights.

3.5 The Normative Content of the Paramount Moral Status

Keeping in mind that status content constituting reasons and reasons for status attribution play different roles helps to delineate more clearly what normative content we should acknowledge the paramount moral status to have.

  1. (1)

    The reason for which human dignity is a normative status for us is, in the final analysis, that beings for whom it is normal that they develop some moral commitments (i.e. “a morality”) and respect themselves as such beings. This is the humanum characteristic even though de facto not every single human being develops moral commitments and even though de facto not every single human being acquires the respective self-respect.

  2. (2)

    The reason for attributing human dignity to suitable bearers of this normative status is the fact of having the property of belonging to a kind of living beings for which it is normal to develop some moral commitments (i.e. “a morality”) and to respect themselves as such beings. Any and every human being is, was, or will be a living being of this kind, even those human beings of whom it is untypically and unfortunately true that they are no moral agents, not even potentially (e.g. anencephalic newborns). All beings have human dignity for which it is true that they are individuals of a species whose members naturally or normally or typically create moral communities and who value affirmatively the morally normative power of their species.

What normative content does the status human dignity have? What does having the status exclude as impermissibly inconsistent with it? Since we are dealing here with the most general form of moral consideration (i.e. the giving of moral status, the making of something or someone into a moral object of a certain kind); and since every typical member of a community of moral agents is equal to any other typical member of that community in being able to give status, the status human dignity cannot contain more or less than this: that every moral agent, and no one more than any other, shall be included in the most general form of moral consideration. With this in mind, we can articulate the normative content of the status human dignity. Its normative content is a perfectly inclusive and perfectly egalitarian claim (n): What having human dignity normatively requires is that people (and other moral agents perhaps of a different kind) should treat people (and …) in such a way that some value is to be placed on their own judgment of how they want to be treated and how they do not want to be treated, across all actual or possible situations in which it is or could be our concern how people (and …) should be allowed to treat people (and …).

Disregard of this most general form of moral consideration is implicit in all violations of the more specific moral rules contained in full-fledged moralities, e.g. the moral rules “do not kill”, “keep your promises” etc. of common morality (Gert, 2004). It should be evident that the notion of human dignity alone is not the philosopher’s stone with the power to resolve all deep moral disagreements in a consensual way. Burdening human dignity with such unrealistic hopes runs the risk of switching from overestimation to rejection out of disappointments. We can and should avoid both extremes.

Two explicatory remarks: In (n), the formulation “that some value is to be placed on their own judgment” initially leaves open the extent to which the normative judgments of everyone concerned are to be taken into account. Within the discourse ethics framework, Habermas would be mute whereas Apel would refer to the premise that “that the members of the communication community (and this implies all thinking beings) are committed to considering all the potential claims of all the potential members - and this means all human “needs” inasmuch as they could be affected by norms and consequently make claims on their fellow human beings. As potential claims that can be communicated interpersonally, all human needs are ethically relevant” (Apel, 1996a [1973]). Human needs must be acknowledged to the extent that they can be justified interpersonally through arguments. We would be unable, however, to find out via discourse to what extent they can be so justified unless we would not presuppose that we initially accord prima facie equal importance to any discourse participant’s need-claims.

In (n), the formulation “and other moral agents perhaps of a different kind” expresses the possibility that we might come to recognize beings of non-human kinds as full moral agents. The fact that so far we are acquainted with moral agents only of our kind is not a metaphysically necessary fact. The fact that the normative content in the notion of human dignity refers to us makes this notion anthropocentric, but contingently so. Note that things are different with human rights. Human rights would not make sense unless their normative contents were tailor-made to respond to basic needs-claims of individuals within the general form of life of humans.

4 Is the Notion of Human Dignity Speciecistic?

The preceding section pointed out that the moral notion of human dignity has the precise sense of emphasizing within the variable range of possible moral considerations their original precondition: the moral agents themselves. Our rich network of moral considerations, as elastic as it is, cannot vary on pain of absurdity in such a way that it does not always include and privilege moral responsibility for moral agents’ good or ill. Suppose someone advocates a morality according to which the moral agents should always consider only moral objects of other kinds, e.g. animals or plants or environmental conditions, but never themselves as the moral agents they are, so that in case of conflict they themselves as moral actors would not count. Such a morality is hypothetically conceivable but would not stand the test of argumentative discourse since it would be impossible to justify with good reasons. It would be a morality beyond human dignity. Such a morality would not be discursively robust.

Returning to the morality advocated by the Great Ape Project: Do we have really compelling reasons for thinking that the great apes are our moral equals? Admittedly, there are many good reasons for protecting the great apes because there are many aspects under which we can appreciate them as highly valuable creatures. For instance, we might admire orang-utans for their strength; we might attribute personality and individual temperament to chimpanzees when we come to know them well, as for instance in field research; and we might develop protective attitudes towards apes once we recognize the plight of those who are used as laboratory animals under conditions that we find abhorrent. What I want to question, however, is whether there are reasons available to anyone who is prepared to consider the matter seriously such that these reasons would make it morally unavoidable to include all great apes in the scope of our most important universalistic moral claims just like it is indeed undeniable that we have to include all human beings in the scope of our most important universalistic moral claims. Among us humans as moral peers, the most important universalistic moral claims pertain to basic rights, and correspondingly, to human dignity as underwriting human rights morally.

Let the following schema (D) represent the abstract conceptual structure of what for a specimen x belonging to kind X to have dignity consists in:

(D) For an individual x to have dignity is.

  1. 1.

    to be recognized by moral agents

  2. 2.

    as normatively requiring their respect

  3. 3.

    in ways that are appropriate to the dignity they know X (= x’s kind of being) to have.

Note that (D) is compatible with the possibility that we come to recognize, e.g. bovine dignity B, or chimpanzee dignity C. Such dignity (dignities?) would prescribe and proscribe certain ways of treating cows and chimpanzees as giving proper expression to respect for the bovine dignity and the chimpanzee dignity that we have come to recognize for these kinds of beings. And the corresponding normative contents of statuses B and C and their consequent normative implications (e.g., rights-claims, that would codify proper ways of treating cows and chimpanzees) might differ drastically from the norms that qualify the ways of treating human beings as giving proper expression of the respect that is normatively required specifically by human dignity H. Yet to accept that the relation of individuals of some kind having dignity is amenable to a pluralistic interpretation is not the same as to accept that any one sort of kind-specific dignity can be extended so that its normative content and ascription constraints can coherently include the normative content and ascription constraints of another, or of any other, kind-specific dignity X. Assuming for the sake of discourse that we can rationally make sense not only of human dignity H (as we certainly can) but also of B and C. It still does not follow that we can rationally make sense of running together H and C, or B, nor that the normative content of H can be broadened so as to subsume C, or B, or both.

But can we indeed rationally make sense of C? Assuming the role of an advocate of the Declaration on Great Apes for a moment, we might want to argue that once we articulate our reasons for justifying the familiar normative implications of human dignity (e.g. basic rights to life, protection of individual liberty, and prohibition of torture) we must admit that the same reasons commit us to extending the familiar normative implications of human dignity to other great apes as well.

I doubt that we are so committed. In order to see that we are not, let me rehearse the central argument of the preceding section. In virtue of being human, we all belong to a kind of which it is characteristic that its members consider it natural or normal or typical for all members of their kind to develop some moral stance or other in the course of their life. (There are many other things, of course, that are species-typically human. We consider it natural or normal or typical that human beings develop some personal identity, learn to speak some language, become competent in the ways of their culture, develop some sexual preferences, etc.) No matter what particular moral stance people develop and no matter that different moral stances can partially clash, by developing any moral stance people will already manifest themselves as both a source of moral concern for others (at least for their cultural peers) and find themselves exposed as an object of others’ moral concerns (at least of those of their cultural peers). As a matter of fact, people’s moral concerns may differ wildly. The object range of our moral concerns is extremely flexible. Without paradox, some people are able to recognize some sort of moral status in wild orchids, and without paradox some people are able to give different moral status to sentient beings, to higher animals, and to people as our fellow human beings. However, in doing so we all manifest ourselves as givers of moral status to someone or something of a certain kind. Our own moral status is the status of being able to confer (all sorts of) moral status, including our own. This normative capacity sets us apart from anything of a kind on which we can confer moral status but which cannot give moral status to us in return.

Until then, the discourse theory of morality, human rights, and human dignity is methodologically anthropocentric. But never anthropochauvinistic.