Dignity and Humiliation

In Created from Animals, James Rachels argues that evolutionary theory undermined the "traditional" and wide-spread conception of dignity, based on our being in the image of God and on our rationality.  It does so by undermining the teleological worldview and challenging our conception of ourselves as uniquely rational.  Certainly there is something to this.  Teleology is difficult if not impossible to defend in the face of Darwinism, and the fields of psychology and ethology show that human rationality is subject to all sorts of errors and limitations, while animals are capable of much higher degrees of rationality than most people previously imagined.  And yet ...

What strikes me as fundamentally flawed in Rachels' approach is not the conclusion he draws about the conception of dignity he focuses on, but that this conception is extraordinarily limited.  If one seeks to undermine the claim that human beings are worthy of special moral consideration, as Rachels does, then it strikes me that he has set up a straw man.

To demonstrate how difficult it would be to eliminate the notion of dignity from our lives, consider the experience of humiliation.  To be humiliated by another is to suffer a blow to one's self-respect, which of course is closely tied to our sense of dignity.  It's hard to see that non-human animals are capable of humiliation, though they can be degraded, abused, and so on.  Why?  Because they don't have a conception of self-respect; they are incapable of dignity.  So it would seem that if we are to do away with all notions of dignity--if, that is, we are to not see ourselves as at all worthy of special moral consideration--then it's not clear what room will be left for humiliation.  Indeed, one might wonder what place there is for humiliation within a utilitarian worldview.  (If James Rachels' son, Stuart, is out there looking in on this, I'd like to see what he'd have to say on this matter, since he's taken on his father's legacy.)

Dignity and the Relational Self

I've just finished the exhausting task of working through the nearly 600 page Human Dignity and Bioethics: Essays Commissioned by the President's Council on Bioethics and am beginning to gain a sense of how best to understand the notion of dignity.  In particular, I've been struck by a point Holmes Rolston III makes in his contribution to the collection.  Like many other theorists, Rolston takes great pains to explain what distinguishes us from other animals in order to locate the source of our dignity.  Indeed, he does so at least as thoroughly and eloquently as anyone I've read on the topic.  (This is no surprise, given the reputation he has established throughout his career.)  While his theism is unquestionably in the background of his account, nothing he says depends on theism, so we can safely set that whole issue aside.

At one point in his discussion, Rolston mentions the fact that we as individuals can situate ourselves within a personal history.  We can look to the past and project into the future.  This, I think, is a key insight into the notion of dignity, particularly if we tie it to the narrative conception of the self; it's worth more development than Rolston devotes to it.  Each person's narrative embodies and expresses goals, values, motivations, etc., all of which are at the heart of our self-conception and self-respect.  Because of this, we see ourselves as objects of respect--we feel an imperative that others ought to treat us in a certain way.  And, because we are capable of imaginative projection (a high-level type of empathy), we similarly perceive others as objects of respect.

Discussions of dignity commonly distinguish between dignity that is due to a person simply in virtue of being a person, and a type of dignity that has to do with having high standing.  I believe the account I'm developing above can accommodate both of these types of dignity.  Foundational dignity can be tied to the capacity of forming a narrative, while "dignity as an achievement" can be tied to the value of the narratives we construct/live.

Of course, all this needs to be spelled out in much greater detail, but for the first time, I feel like I might have something useful to contribute to the conversation.

Dignity and Transhumanism

It would seem that transhumanism--roughly, the use of technology to fundamentally change our nature--poses some of the biggest current challenges to human dignity.  Whether it's the self-transformation of the person who calls himself "Cat Man" (Google him, it's rather disturbing) or suggestions about how to change human physiology and/or psychology to make us more adapted to a world facing rapid climate change, technology is being used or being proposed to be used in ways eerily similar to those anticipated nearly 100 years ago in Huxley's Brave New World.  To get discussion going on this issue, I propose the following scenario/question.  Suppose we developed the technology that would allow us to (d)evolve into seal-like creatures, similar to those in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Galapagos, and suppose the use of this technology were urged as a means to protect the environment from future human activities.  How should the resulting loss of human dignity figure in our decision-making about whether to proceed?