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.)