Criticizing the idea of human dignity is about as popular as attacking motherhood, apple pie, and cute puppies. In its current form, the idea is well-intentioned, and the phrase itself—“human dignity”—has a satisfying emotional ring. But I have serious misgivings about invoking human dignity as a consideration in political and legal contexts. Let me explain.
As described by the late Allen Buchanan, an eminent American philosopher and bioethicist, the fascist/militarist ideologies of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and certain nations allied with them incorporated two elements that are radically opposed to the values of liberal democratic societies: radical status inegalitarianism, with its denial that all human beings share equal basic moral worth, and radical collectivism, which views the individual as of no significant moral worth in his or her own right. Rather, whatever worth we have in the eyes of fascist/militarist ideologues is dependent on our usefulness to the nation.
The postwar human rights project and international human rights law are based on civilized nations’ rejection of such inhumane and totalitarian doctrines. In that historical context, “human dignity” can be understood as a verbal formula with which to reject radical status inegalitarianism, radical collectivism, and related ideas such as Nazi theories of racial hierarchy. If nothing else, discourse about human dignity conveys the attractive thought that we should regard all our fellow human beings as possessing a basic entitlement to consideration of their interests, irrespective of what racial or other demographic categories they fall into or how “useful” they are believed to be. That idea has far-reaching and welcome implications.
Nonetheless, the concept has a much longer history, going back to pre-Christian Roman thinkers such as Cicero and thereafter to the emergent theology of the Catholic Church in late Western antiquity. The Latin word dignitas originally referred to rank, and the dignity of human beings (or at least of Christians) was thus their high rank in the cosmic order. The concept of dignity appears to have been introduced into Christian theology by Pope Leo I (Leo the Great) in the fifth century CE. Leo called for Christians to remember their dignitas and thus refrain from conduct worthy only of creatures of lower rank.
This understanding of dignity has not been entirely superseded, whether by the philosophical contribution of Immanuel Kant during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment or by more recent events. Yet present-day science shows no evidence of a hierarchical cosmic order that might have seemed plausible a few centuries ago. Such an idea can still be given a religious basis, because religions suppose a transcendent order of things invisible to ordinary human perceptions or to science. However, a concept that requires a basis such as this is not appropriate as a foundation for law, or for rights, in liberal democratic societies.
The individuals who negotiated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the late 1940s were able to agree on the formulation “human dignity” to underpin the rights eventually identified and declared in the document, but they did not agree on the meaning of this expression or on how the existence of human dignity might be demonstrated or justified. In other words, the use of this phrase was a compromise among postwar negotiators with no deeper rationale that has since been discovered. It is merely a contingency of history that we now use this phrase rather than some other.
This might not matter if the phrase were used solely as a formula for rejecting fascist and other totalitarian doctrines and, hence, the dehumanization and destruction that they invariably bring. But the idea of human dignity is endlessly and sometimes dangerously manipulable. Over time, numerous activities and innovations have been opposed on the grounds that they are beneath the dignity of human beings. Apart from the sensual indulgences that Leo the Great had in mind and urged his followers to renounce, human dignity has been invoked to oppose such diverse things as industrial machinery, women’s suffrage, and eating potatoes.
Most prominently, the concept of human dignity is used by conservative bioethicists to argue against stem cell research, abortion, and physician-assisted suicide, although these practices are in no way comparable to the actions of 1930s and 1940s fascist/militarist ideologues. As a result, many bioethicists of a less conservative stripe are now rightly suspicious of the concept of human dignity.
Consider: If high cosmic rank attaches to a tiny human blastocyst, it is arguably a great moral wrong to experiment on such an entity and destroy it, even though it clearly does not possess the same interests as a fully formed human child or adult. At the other end of life, terminally ill patients who are suffering greatly (even if their physical pain can be controlled to some extent by drugs) may have an interest in dying to end lives that they now find oppressive. However, the concept of human dignity can be employed against their interests. It can be used to suggest that their lives possess an objective cosmic importance that overrides their own interests, and so it is a great moral wrong for them to commit suicide or for others to assist them to do so.
There is much more to say, pro and con, about invocations of human dignity in political deliberation and the law, but perhaps this is enough to show that the idea has a less attractive side and that it can lead to illiberal public policy. In particular, it opens up metaphysical considerations that should not determine political decisions relating to the beginning and end of human life.