The Challenge of Upholding Human Dignity

If inherent human dignity exists—and the judgment that it does is a foundation-stone of liberal democracy—then the contingent particularity of every person (embodied, fragile, here-now-gone-tomorrow) is also a participation in a transcendent value, an “absolute good.”

The equation is fairly simple: if there is no “transcendent value,” then there is no equal “personal value.”

What else besides the showing-forth of transcendent mystery could the “equality” of all persons mean?—that is, an equality that can’t be violated; can’t be revoked by society; that not only consists of “equality before the law,” but of “ontological equality.”

To respect equal inherent dignity in a philosophically informed way, then, means to respect every human being—including oneself—as a showing-forth of transcendent reality.

Those who “get this” about themselves can get pretty worked up about it. Religious literalists, exclusivist doctrinalists, and fanatics generally, hold firm to the fact of human involvement in transcendence. But—alas!—they forget or deny the mysteriousness of transcendence and of conscious participation in it.

There is a problem, in this case, of both experiential openness and of self-interpretation.

Those who do attend experientially to the mystery of the transcendent Beyond—whatever their relationship to “religion” or “spiritual practice”—are those who find in the “within” of consciousness a revelation of boundlessness, or “illocality,” as Emily Dickinson put it. Two and a half millennia before Dickinson, Heraclitus had already stated: “You could not find the limits of the soul, even if you travelled every path, so deep is its logos.” Philo, five centuries after Heraclitus, put it this way: “Those who can see lift their eyes to heaven, and contemplate the Manna, the divine Logos. Those who cannot see, look at the onions in the ground.”

Nothing against onions. Or gardening. It’s a metaphor.

Those who “can see,” though, still all too easily fall into the trap of thinking that only “spirit,” and not the animality that founds personal presence in the world, has intrinsic value.

But it is the whole human being—in its incarnate unity—that possesses basic dignity.

Every human person is embodied: physical, chemical, and complex biological structures make possible and sustain personal being-in-the-world, and this embodied person is an ontological unity. Basic dignity therefore accrues to each level in the hierarchy of being sustaining personal presence. Inherent dignity reaches down through all the building blocks of human existence.

This is why achievements of dignified living are not necessary for inherent dignity to be manifest. Inherent dignity shows itself in the entire human being, whatever that human being does, or might do, or cannot do.

Of course, it’s true that the notion of inherent human dignity arose from appreciation of the distinctive capacities that belong to humans, including those of conscious inquiry and insight; the presence of moral awareness and free choice; powers of creativity and love; and the artistry of unique self-determination.

But any of these capacities might be diminished, damaged, not yet effective, or only formerly effective, with humanness still being manifest, still “there.” In which case, inherent dignity is still “there.” Damian Fedoryka has stated the matter with precision: “Dignity is predicated [on the fact] of the being itself rather than any of its specific properties, even if these properties are the reason that dignity is predicated.”

What, then, is the most elementary human “presentation” that should call forth our basic “respect for human dignity”?

Simply the living human being in his or her physical presence—a presence that represents all the potentialities of a human being as free, rational, moral, and self-defining even when the effective probabilities of realizing these potentialities are in the individual case low, minimal, or—as far as we can tell—zero; and even when free self-making has become degraded and twisted.

Emmanuel Levinas has written that this “presence” confronts us most inescapably through the human face. That which is presented in the human face, he says, “visits me as already ab-solute,” as non-dissolvable into bare matter, or into a mechanism, or into a mere means to an end. The face turns to me, beseeching or angry, inquisitive or indifferent, eloquent or mute. But in every case, it remains a window onto transcendence, and so inherent dignity makes its claim on me. (And note: any part of the human body can represent the face—a hand, a bony kneecap). I can respect this dignity, or I can turn away.

What does it entail—existentially speaking—to not “turn away”?

It means respecting the dignity of the person by willing their good (however this willing is actualized—perhaps only as a fleeting attitude of concern).

To “will the good of the other”: this is one of the classic definitions, in Western philosophy, of “love.” Love in this sense obviously doesn’t mean a certain type of emotion, or a propulsive experience of eros (though it’s not something incompatible with either of them). Here “love” means: a self-transcending concern for the well-being of a creature.

(That creature may be oneself. To love oneself, in the higher sense, means to will one’s own good—the good of being, say, healthy, virtuous, or authentic. And it is a self-transcending concern for the well-being of oneself—a “self-transcending” relationship to oneself being possible because of self-presence, which allows one to stand, as it were, aside from oneself, and engage in self-choosing. So we can despise ourselves; be indifferent to ourselves; be greedy for ourselves; or—in a joyful and virtuous sense—love ourselves.)

And to will the good of any human being—which at a minimum is to be respectful of their basic dignity—always implicates oneself in one’s relationship to transcendence, since every person is a transparency for the transcendent ground of being. To “be loving toward” anyone with respect to their basic human value, then, is at the same time to calibrate one’s relationship with the ontological absolute that (while remaining mysterious) grounds the “absoluteness” of basic human dignity and rights.

Of course, it’s often difficult to respect the basic dignity of a certain person.

Consider the case of a terrorist. On July 22, 2011, the Norwegian domestic terrorist Anders Behring Breivig, a far-right ideologue, detonated a bomb in downtown Oslo killing eight people and, shortly afterwards, on the island of Utoya, shot to death sixty-nine participants in a Worker’s Youth League summer camp.

Once he was captured, on Utoya, and his responsibility for his actions readily admitted, why was he not simply executed on the spot?

Because, on the basis of his inherent dignity as a human being, he was regarded as having rights—including a right to be free of extra-legal punishment; a right to trial by jury; a right to the opportunity for self-explanation; and a right to respectful treatment in court.

So Anders Breivik, even after his murder of seventy-seven people, was still—to put it bluntly—considered to have an “incalculable” human worth.

Not only that: the principle of human equality affirms that Breivik, the accused and later condemned and incarcerated terrorist (Norway has no death penalty), remains on some kind of elemental level a person in the human community who is as “deserving of reverence” (to use Kant’s phrase) as any other person.

Breivik, an anti-Islamist and anti-immigration xenophobe, who stated that he was acting to “defend” Christian Europe, would obviously find such a notion of a universal “human community” laughable.

Respecting inherent dignity has its grim ironies.

In the wake of an act of terror, then, the perpetrator is to be regarded as still imbued with a “sacredness of personhood” (Hans Joas) equal to that of his victims.

None of this is to suggest, needless to say, that the views or actions of terrorists are dignified, worthy of our respect. Respect for a person’s choices or mode of living is conditional.

But inherent dignity, as “inviolable,” demands—however it might discomfit us—unconditional respect.

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