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?

Random Nietzsche Quote

While visiting a used bookstore last week, I picked up a copy of Nietzsche's The Use and Abuse of History, one of the few things of his I had not read.  Now I have and was fascinated by how much it anticipates much of his later philosophy but also presents many important ideas not found in his other works.  Speaking as a non-historian, it strikes me that it should be required reading for any serious student of history.  In any case, one passage jumped out at me as worth sharing because of its humor:
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The Greeks, the famous people of a past still near to us, had the "unhistorical sense" strongly developed in the period of their greatest power.  If a typical child of his age were transported to that world by some enchantment, he would probably find the Greeks very "uneducated."  And that discovery would betray the closely guarded secret of modern culture to the laughter of the world.  For we moderns have nothing of our own.  We only become worth notice by filling ourselves to overflowing with foreign customs, arts, philosophies, religions, and sciences; we are wandering encyclopedias, as an ancient Greek who had strayed into our time would probably call us.  But the only value of an encyclopedia lies on the inside, in the contents, not in what is written outside, on the binding or the wrapper.  And so the whole of modern culture is essentially internal; the bookbinder prints something like this on the cover: "Manual of internal culture for external barbarians."

From Schiller to Smith

Glancing through Schiller's "On Grace and Dignity" and "Dignity" this evening, I was struck by how similar it sounded to some points Adam Smith makes in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.  In particular, Schiller claims that the union of grace and dignity in a person represents our highest ideal.  For Smith, it's the union of the amible and respectable virtues.  The latter of these are "the great, the awful and respectable, the virtues of self-denial, of self-government, of that command of the passions which subjects all the movements of our nature to what our own dignity and honour, and the propriety of our own conduct require ..."  This is very much in line with Schiller's conception of dignity.  I fear, however, that comparing Schiller's notion of grace and Smith's conception of the amiable virtues might be forced.  Sorting all this out be a good Capstone project for any of you WSU students out there.

Dignity and Utilitarianism

In Utilitarianism, Mill explains our privileging the higher pleasures by appeal to our sense of dignity:  "but its most appropriate appellation is a sense of dignity, which all human beings possess in one form or other, and in some, though by no means in exact, proportion to their higher faculties, and which is so essential a part of the happiness of those in whom it is strong, that nothing which conflicts with it could be, otherwise than momentarily, an object of desire to them."  (Notice that he does not say that the degree of dignity varies with our higher faculties; only our sense of dignity does.)  And yet it can be charged that utilitarianism is fundamentally at odds with the notion of dignity, as suggested by many of the objections that have been raised against it.  In asking whether it is permissible to enslave another, for example, the champion of dignity will argue that utilitarian considerations are entirely out of place.  At bottom, what this comes to is whether any sort of value monism assumed by utilitarianism can accommodate a notion like dignity.

Dignity--Australopithecines, Humans, and God

In his book Human Dignity, George Kateb writes, “The core idea of human dignity is that on earth, humanity is the greatest type of beings—or what we call species because we have learned to see humanity as one species in the animal kingdom, which is made up of many other species along with our own—and that every member deserves to be treated in a manner consonant with the high worth of the species."

An interesting thought experiment.  Suppose first of all that there were not such a gulf between us and the other animals.  Suppose, in other words, that there still lived a continuum of hominids between us and, say, the australopithecines.  What might that do to our conception of dignity?  Push this idea even further.  Suppose there existed (either currently or in past times) a hominid species both cognitively and morally superior to us.  How might that affect our conception of dignity?

From a theological perspective, of course, our dignity comes from being in some way(s) like God.  But if you remove God from the picture and put in God’s place a superior, yet flawed species, would we still assert our dignity, based on our similarity to them?  Or is the whole comparison issue beside the point?  I would suspect that so long as the members of a species have a sense of self-worth (dare I bring in the notion of respect here?), they would have a conception of something like dignity.