Karlsruhe, 2006: a court accepting that more would die, and holding that it did not matter.
Dignity
Worth that commands respect and cannot be traded - the claim that a person is not a price.
- Theme
- Ethics and character
- Tradition
- Western
- Term
- Würde
- Term fixed
- 1785
In plain terms
Everything with a price can be replaced by something of equal value. Kant's claim is that a person cannot, because a person has no price.
That is not a statement about how valuable people are. It is a statement about what kind of value they have - one that does not sit on a scale with other things and cannot be exchanged for a sufficient quantity of anything.
The practical upshot is a limit on aggregation. If people have dignity in this sense, then some things cannot be done to a person however much benefit would follow, because doing them treats the person as a quantity to be weighed. That limit is what every rights document since 1945 is trying to state, and it is the most consequential single idea in modern law.
As a philosopher would put it
Kant's formulation: what has a price can be replaced by an equivalent, while what is above all price and admits no equivalent has dignity. It attaches to rational nature, grounds the formula of humanity - treat humanity always as an end and never merely as a means - and belongs to every rational being equally regardless of merit or capacity.
Its legal career begins after 1945. The Universal Declaration opens with the inherent dignity of all members of the human family, and the German Basic Law makes it the first article and unamendable.
The standing philosophical objection is Macklin's: that dignity adds nothing to respect for autonomy and functions as a slogan concealing disagreement. Defenders reply that it does work autonomy cannot - it covers those without present rational capacity, it grounds duties toward the dead, and it explains why some consented-to arrangements remain impermissible. Which is precisely why it is contested: the cases where it does independent work are the cases where it overrides someone's choice.
Where you meet it
After the attacks of 11 September 2001 Germany passed an Aviation Security Act authorising the armed forces to shoot down a passenger aircraft that had been turned into a weapon against people on the ground.
In February 2006 the Federal Constitutional Court struck the provision down. Its reasoning went directly to Article 1: the passengers would be killed as a means of saving others, they were in a hopeless situation not of their making, and treating them as objects in a calculation denied them the value due to a human being for their own sake.
The court accepted that more people would die if the aircraft were not shot down. It held that this did not matter, because the state may not treat some lives as material for the preservation of others. It is the clearest instance anywhere in law of Kant's formula of humanity being applied as a binding constraint against a plainly better outcome - and it remains controversial for exactly that reason.
What is actually disputed
Whether dignity does any work of its own.
The deflationary case is that every genuine appeal to dignity can be restated as respect for autonomy, and that the term is used precisely where an argument is missing - Macklin's charge that it is a useless concept, invoked to end discussion rather than to advance it.
The reply is that autonomy cannot cover the cases that matter most: infants, people with severe cognitive impairment, the unconscious, and the dead all seem to be owed something, and none of them has a choice to respect.
But that reply exposes the deeper problem. If dignity attaches to rational nature, those cases are hard to include; if it attaches to being human, it needs an account of why species membership confers it that does not simply assert it. And the cases where dignity most obviously does independent work are those in which it overrides what a person has actually chosen, which is where its critics say it becomes an instrument for imposing a view of what people are for.
Commonly confused with
- Autonomy 1785 Autonomy is a capacity that can be lost. Dignity is claimed for people who have lost it, which is exactly where the two come apart.
- dying with dignity A phrase about circumstances at the end of life. Whether it means the same as the philosophical concept is precisely what the euthanasia debate disputes.
Defined against
- Utility A worth that admits no equivalent and a measure that permits any trade-off given a large enough total are directly incompatible
Philosophers
- Immanuel Kant Dignity as worth without equivalent, attaching to rational nature
- Cicero Dignitas as standing appropriate to a role
- Pico della Mirandola Human worth grounded in self-determination
- Hannah Arendt The right to have rights, and dignity's collapse without a polity
- Friedrich Nietzsche The suspicion that equal worth is a levelling doctrine
Works
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals The formulation, and the price-dignity distinction
- The Origins of Totalitarianism What happens to dignity when statelessness removes standing
- A Theory of Justice Where inviolability is built into the theory's foundations
- An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation The utilitarian framework it constrains
- On the Genealogy of Morals The genealogical attack on equal worth
Schools
- German Idealism Where dignity is given its modern form
- Renaissance Humanism Where human worth is asserted before Kant
- Thomism Where it is grounded in the image of God
- Personalism Where the person is the central ethical category
- Classical Utilitarianism The framework dignity is invoked against
Related concepts
Autonomy 1785 · Moral personhood 1694 · Rights 1689 · Value 1887 · The Other 1961
Cicero's dignitas is standing appropriate to rank, and Pico's oration extends it to human beings as such; Kant's contribution is that dignity belongs to every rational being equally and admits of no equivalent.