Dignity

by James Beauregard

My first attendance at the International Conference on Persons was in August of 2013, held at the University of Lund, Sweden.  While I had been reading personalism for some time, it was the first opportunity I had had to gather with a group of dedicated personalist philosophers, allowing me to experience personalism as it was happening – as papers were presented, as ideas were being shared, as new ideas were being formed. Belying the comment of a Swedish co-worker at the time, who told me that “All Swedish food is grey,” I also discovered more variety, in colour and flavour than that statement would have led me to believe. I also inadvertently discovered that there are some very good Italian restaurants in southern Sweden – who knew? Many personalist conversations were conducted over red sauce that week. That Italian food proved so congenial to personalist discussion was not the least of the reasons that I organized the dinner for the Boston International Conference on Persons in the city’s Italian section, the “North End.”

But, back to Sweden - I remember Randy Auxier’s introduction to the conference on the first day.  In those introductory remarks he made it a point to mention the notion of human dignity “something personalists profess to care about.” In a sense, this set the tone for the week for me – thanks Randy! – and more recently has led me to consider human dignity more carefully, and in a more organized fashion. 

In much of the world, both East and West, the concept of dignity has fallen on hard times.  In some places, dignity talk is ignored or banished, in others attacked, in still others devalued or ridiculed, and still, in some places, recognized and affirmed.

How did we come to this situation in a relatively short span of time?  In the years after the Second World War we saw the promulgation of some of the greatest documents on human dignity and human rights that the world has known – the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights being a flagship example and in inspiration for many other documents that would follow.  

Jump ahead with me from 1948 to 2003, when the American bioethicist Ruth Macklin published a brief editorial in the BMJ called “Dignity is a useless concept.”[1] She concluded her essay with the statement, “Dignity is a useless concept in medical ethics and can be eliminated without any loss of content.”[2]  For Macklin, the origins of the concept of dignity are obscure, shrouded in “mystery” and she deemed the concept of dignity incoherent due to its vagueness imprecision, to the point where it could invoked by multiple sides in debates on life issues.[3] She argued further that dignity had been drawn into bioethical debate as a substitute term for autonomy and “respect for persons,”  terms she found more specific and useful.[4] Noting the lack of a concrete working definition of dignity in various bioethical and international rights documents, she stated that “In the absence of criteria that can enable us to know just when dignity is violated, the concept remains hopelessly vague.”[5] A final criticism of dignity was addressed to its origins in religious sources, “especially, but not exclusively in Roman Catholic writings,”  that have “crept into the secular literature in medical ethics.”[6] Because of this, the aetiology of the concept of dignity, in her view, remained “a mystery.”[7]

There is much to ponder here. Is dignity still a useful concept, and if so, in what contexts?  How should it come into play?  What are the consequences of including dignity in public conversation and what are the consequences of its absence? Macklin’s views have not going unchallenged, and there is a literature since 2003 in direct response to her shot across the bow, as well as a continuation of dignity more generally that we will also consider.

Macklin’s comments may seem damning – vagueness, incoherence.  The concept of dignity has been employed on both sides of the assisted sides debate – the dignity of the human person defended against assisted suicide on the one hand, and death with dignity on the other.  But the problem runs deeper than the issue of language and of definition.  What is at stake is human persons, and not least our very understanding of who is a person, what constitutes personhood.  When we speak of dignity, either to support it or criticize it, we are speaking at some level of the dignity of persons. 

What I am writing here is the beginning of an investigation – an investigation of dignity, which is something that, as Randy said back in 2013, is something that should receive the attention of personalist philosophers and theologians.  To do this, this blog begins a series of reflections on human dignity that will look at the context and history of the notion of dignity to create a context, and that will then look at dignity in its contemporary context, which presents multiple perspectives, some in favour of recognizing dignity, some against it. I will be asking the question of dignity, and as a precursor, the question of persons, to whom dignity is ascribed or denied, or removed from the conversation altogether. In the next instalment, the long history of the concept of dignity will be our starting point.

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[1] Ruth Macklin, “Dignity is a useless concept,” BMJ, 327 (20-27 December 2003): 1419-1420.

[2] Ibid., 1420.

[3] Macklin specifically mentions the California Natural Death Act in 1976 in the debate on death with dignity, 1419.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid, 1420.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.