Where is Dignity?
Moral Skepticism
The concept of dignity is very important in ethics, politics, and law. Human beings possess dignity, and for that reason we have rights. It is immoral to treat a human being as a mere instrument. We are ends in ourselves. We possess dignity, and therefore we deserve a dignified wage, autonomy, privacy, and so on.
But despite the importance of the idea of dignity, there are troubling questions about the foundation of this concept. What exactly is dignity? Does it consist in a specific and measurable property? Or is it merely a fiction that we have invented?
Dignity is a very abstract concept. An abstract concept is something detached from realization in a concrete, particular, and tangible object. This computer, for example, on which I am writing this article, is something concrete. I can detect this computer through several senses. It is not the general idea of a laptop. It is an instance of a particular computer. I can touch and see this laptop. It has a specific location in space and time.
Something abstract lacks this concrete specificity. We cannot touch or see something abstract. It is a general concept, not a concrete manifestation. Something abstract has no location in space and time.
Abstract concepts seem fragile. If they have no concrete realization, do they really exist? There is a major debate in the history of philosophy concerning the existence of universals. A universal concept is a concept of something that applies to particular instances, but which is not itself a concrete thing.
Dignity is not something we can see or touch. We cannot point to a location in space and time and say, “Here is dignity.” A person has hair, eye color, a nose, arms, height, weight, and so forth. A person possesses many concrete and measurable properties. But dignity is not one of them.
Thus, we must confront the problem of skepticism regarding dignity. It is reasonable to say that the concept of dignity does not really exist. If it lacks a foundation in concrete, particular, and tangible reality, perhaps it exists only in our minds.
Yet the concept of dignity is the foundation of centuries of law and morality. If we were to lose this concept, we would face the collapse of our moral system and our shared values.
Immanuel Kant takes an interesting position on this problem. Kant presents the human being as a member of two worlds (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:454). We are part of the empirical world, which manifests itself before our senses. The empirical world is the material and concrete world that appears in space and time. We possess bodies and physical traits that are material and concrete. We exist in space and time.
But our empirical aspect does not exhaust our being. We are also members of the intelligible world. We possess intangible aspects that are not realized within space and time. Our consciousness, for example, is an intangible experience that we cannot physically detect. A neuroscientific investigation of our brains does not reveal thoughts and experiences. Yet these intangible aspects truly exist in the intelligible world that exceeds the empirical world.
Within the intelligible world, we are able to exercise our capacity for free choice. We are not biochemical machines determined by chemical and hormonal processes. These physical phenomena exist in the empirical world, but they do not exhaust our being. The intelligible world in which we participate permits a capacity for free choice that is independent of physical processes.
Thus, we possess autonomy, and this is the basis of our dignity for Kant (Groundwork, 4:440). A person is not a thing. A thing does not possess a capacity for free choice. My laptop cannot choose whether it will function or not. A banana does not possess the capacity to decide whether it wishes to remain in my kitchen.
Autonomy is a barrier against instrumentalization. A person possesses dignity because it is immoral to treat something with autonomy as a mere instrument. Through the idea of two worlds—which has its own problems, of course—Kant succeeds in grounding the idea of dignity.
Melencolia I, Albrecht Dürer