The Historical Roots of Human Dignity in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The four members of the UN’s Commission on Human Rights responsible for crafting the final version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Charles Malik, Eleanor Roosevelt, P. C. Chang, and René Cassin) knew that the concept of equal and universal human dignity employed in the document carried specific historical baggage.

To shorten a long story: the word “dignity” derives from the Latin dignitas, which originally referred, in Roman culture, to the social influence and prestige belonging to a man of moral repute and respected rank (and to the respect due to his family). But the term gradually became associated less with social status and honor and more with indwelling human value—specifically, with the idea of the nobility of human reason emphasized by Stoic philosophers, and with the Jewish and Christian view of human beings as imago Dei—as made “in the image and likeness of God.”

Western expositions on human dignity up to and beyond the Enlightenment were built, mainly, on the scaffolding of the Christian anthropology, which elaborated the imago Dei symbol: a human being is a creature who, in a limited way, participates in the powers of reasoning, moral concern, freedom, love, and creativity that belong (perfectly) to divine transcendent being. Patristic and medieval writings on human dignity, early modern political texts addressing natural law and natural rights, Renaissance humanist ideas, Enlightenment declarations about “the rights of man,” and Kant’s influential account of dignity—all reflect this vision of the individual as imago Dei. They also emphasize that each person (1) is unique and irreplaceable, and (2) shares an obligation to respect the divine presence in other persons.

As many scholars have pointed out, the idea of equal human dignity that informs modern declarations of rights, and the idea that “liberal democracy” is the most appropriate (if fragile) political arrangement, is historically rooted in this Christianly elaborated vision of humans as intrinsically invaluable persons capable of the considered use of reason and the responsible exercise of freedom through conscience, awareness of duty, and love.

Most of the members of the Commission responsible for drafting the UDHR, however, were unconcerned with these historical roots, or with Christian belief in a transcendent source of human value. It was otherwise with the four key drafters. Malik was a member of the Greek Orthodox Church, and an ardent Thomist; Roosevelt was a devout and learned Christian; and Cassin and Chang were knowledgeably cosmopolitan with regard to Western religious tradition. All four were cognizant of the indebtedness of twentieth-century liberal democratic principles to the Christian theological vision of humans as persons gifted with an inalienable dignity through created participation in the freedom and self-determination of a transcendent God.

All four of them were finally content, however, that this indebtedness should remain (as politics demanded anyway) unarticulated in the UDHR. Why?

First, because they were all universalists—meaning, they all believed that human nature was the same everywhere, and that unfettered human reason would, in every culture, lead in the end to the same truth about equal, inherent human worth. And second, because they were all pluralists—meaning, they believed that this universal truth about equal dignity could be equivalently symbolized in different language in different cultures, and that such language would reflect equivalent insights about dignity grounded in equivalent experiences adequately interpreted.

Was this confidence well-founded? Is it true that the original Jewish and Christian experiences that engendered insights into the human person as imago Dei, yielding not only that particular symbol but all the elaborations of later Jewish and Christian theologizing regarding the infinite value of each person—is it true that experiences and insights equivalent to these have occurred, or will occur, in other major cultures around the world?

It is a good question. Perhaps a more salient question, though, is how they key drafters thought of the future political role of a decontextualized idea of equal and inherent dignity.

It seems that they regarded the “abstractness” of the concept of human dignity in the UDHR as a strength rather than a weakness—because disengaging the concept from religious reference and philosophical anthropology enables it to symbolically evoke the mystery of intrinsic human value in a universal and open-ended way. Decontextualization shows that the idea of intrinsic human dignity is—and allows the idea as used in the UDHR to function as—an intrinsically heuristic concept.

What does this mean?

Something has a “heuristic” character when it serves and invites the effort of discovery: the x in an algebraic equation is a heuristic symbol, in that it stands for a mathematical content which we do not yet know but aim to discover. Any word can be said to have heuristic role as soon as it piques our curiosity due to an awareness that, while we have some understanding of its meaning, our knowledge of that meaning is incomplete. Terms then cease to function heuristically when we attain a satisfactorily complete understanding of them—for example, when we can define with certainty the idea of, say, habitat, or voltage: that is, when no further relevant questions reasonably arise with regard to our understanding of their basic definitions.

But some words signify concepts that are intrinsically heuristic: concepts whose meaning-content can always be more deeply grasped with successive acts of knowing—where further discovery remains always possible—because the concept’s meaning can never be fully understood by a human being. To say that a word signifies an intrinsically heuristic concept means that it refers to an intelligible reality of which we have some understanding, but whose full or complete meaning remains—and will always to a degree remain—unknown to us.

Intrinsically heuristic concepts play a central role—perhaps needless to say—in human self-knowing. A good example is the concept of happiness, which Aristotle famously examines in his Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle succeeds in “filling in” the meaning-content of the concept of human happiness to no small extent; but in the end, his analysis concludes that its meaning is not completely knowable by us.

Plato’s dialogues, also, entail the exploration of intrinsically heuristic concepts, such as justice, love, and courage. Some discovery about the notion under investigation takes place in each work; but at dialogue’s end, there is never a declaration of having satisfactorily achieved a proper definition. On the contrary, the dialogues almost always end with an assertion that the exploration has gotten off-track, or barely gotten underway. This is not merely because Plato wants his readers to think for themselves and mature through personal efforts of seeking moral insight—though that is one his aims. It is also because he knows that with regard to such ideas no complete understanding is available to us (while at the same time, the more understanding we do attain, the more our moral advance is possible, so continued questioning—in good faith—is always desirable). Thus Plato has Socrates state in the Apology that, however knowledgeable and virtuous persons might become, they must be content in the end to be seekers of wisdom (philosophoi), as “God alone is wise.”

The unadorned affirmation of “inherent dignity” at the beginning of the UDHR reveals, then, the idea of equal and universal human dignity as what it is: an intrinsically heuristic concept. We can have some understanding of it (that is, the meaning of intrinsic human worth)—quite a rich understanding, in fact—but at the same time the idea always remains to some degree mysterious, ever inviting us to further insight into its meaning.

Now, the reason why existential and moral ideas at the core of human self-knowing are intrinsically heuristic is—of course!—because human existence is a conscious participation in the mystery of transcendent reality.

So the notion of inherent human dignity can serve—and in everyday political culture has come to serve, in no small part through the influence of the UDHR—as a generalized and inexplicit marker for the value of beings who are conscious participants in transcendent reality.

To many who now rely heavily on the term in their moral and political arguments, recognizing that this is true would come as quite a surprise.

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