Dignity and Shame

This chapter focuses on personal and social dignity, exploring the source and scope of individuals’ moral claims against having their dignity violated, frustrated, or destroyed. For personal dignity, the grounds of such claims lie primarily in the import of self-respect, but these claims are constrained by the duties they would impose on others. For social dignity, the grounds of such claims lie primarily in the import of social standing, but depend on the individual being entitled to maintain that social standing. This framework sheds light on the wrongs of humiliating or degrading treatment, while avoiding the problematic implication that individuals can appeal to their dignity to protect bigoted behavior from sanction.

The Fragility of Dignity

This chapter utilizes the theoretical framework developed in Chapter 1 to explain how dignity can be violated, frustrated, or destroyed. For personal dignity, violations involve forcing a person to transgress her own dignitarian standards, making her less respect-worthy in her own eyes, while frustrations involve preventing a person from upholding her own dignitarian standards, blocking an avenue for increased self-regard. Social dignity takes the same form, but with community standards taking the place of personal standards. Status dignity, by contrast, is violated when an agent is treated in ways that contravene the recognition respect she is owed in virtue of her membership in a social class, and is frustrated when she is denied access to sites where recognition respect is offered.

Dignity and Recognition

This chapter completes the discussion of the source and scope of individuals’ moral claims against having their dignity violated, frustrated, or destroyed, by considering status dignity. To fail to treat someone as a member of her social class ought to be treated constitutes a dignity violation; but this raises the difficult question of how individuals could have a moral claim to be treated in accordance with socially constructed norms. The answer developed in this chapter builds on the widely accepted idea of legitimate expectations: since social classes inform personal identity, we have a prima facie claim to have those identities recognized. Such claims are illegitimate, though, if granting that recognition would perpetuate the oppression of others. This will often be the case, it is argued, for claims to be recognized as members of hierarchical social classes such as race or gender.

Introduction

This chapter opens by outlining the wide range of uses to which dignity is put, in both philosophical work and public life. These range from postulating dignity as the source of inherent moral worth, on the philosophical side, to accusations that a personal slight violates one’s dignity, on the public side. These various uses are used to motivate three desiderata for a theory of dignity: that it can explain how and why dignity is taken to command respect; that it can explain how and why some people are more dignified than others; and that it can explain how and why dignity can be lost or damaged.

Human Dignity and Human Rights

This chapter argues that human dignity should be understood as one more instantiation of status dignity. Accordingly, to have human dignity is to be a member of the human kind, where the human kind is a socially constructed category. This conception of human dignity is then integrated into an account of human rights, and it is shown that despite being socially constructed, human dignity can serve as the foundation of human rights. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the role of human rights practice in preventing the dehumanization of vulnerable people.

A Theory of Dignity

This chapter opens by critiquing the dominant philosophical approach to dignity, which has its origins in Kant, on the grounds that it excludes vulnerable individuals, and cannot account for the phenomenon of lost or damaged dignity. It then lays out the central theoretical framework that informs the remainder of the book. This framework involves three distinct strands of dignity: personal dignity; social dignity; and status dignity. The strands emerge from distinguishing between self-respect and the respect of others, on the one hand, and recognition respect and appraisal respect, on the other.