A Brief History of Human Dignity: Idea and Application

Abstract

Although the explicit application of the idea of human dignity in international politics and law is very recent, its roots stretch back to the early stages of Western civilization. Two characteristics of the West are important as preconditions for the development of the idea: the West’s belief in the universal validity of its norms and its eventual basing of its norms in secular principles. Both Judeo-Christian monotheism and the Graeco-Roman world’s understanding of humankind underpinned a universalistic view of man’s unique place in the cosmos. Historical sociologist, Max Weber looked to the dual heritage of Christianity and Roman law for the origins of what he famously saw as the unique rationalistic character of Western social, economic, and political relations that ultimately led to modern capitalism and the bureaucratic nation-state. In Rome, the concept of dignity had moral, political, legal, and social meanings; the first referred to integrity or indifference to profit; the second in the Republican era was associated with those in high public offices like the various magistracies, the dignitates; it had another meaning, associated with high social rank; and in law it was applied strictly as ‘greater’ or ‘lesser’ in relation to rank and social condition. It is clear that in Rome dignity was not equally distributed. Roman law was a rational system of secular law, based on the authority of the collective will, the res publica, not on divine authority as interpreted from sacred texts. As Rome became the ruler of the known, civilized world, it adopted the stoic idea of a universal law of nature offering justice and order to all. Through reason, man is part of a rationally organized universe. Reason and nature are congruent. The law of nature is identified with reason and so society, too, is based on the rule of reason. Since all men were moved by ‘right reason,’ as Cicero and the Roman jurists who came after him saw it, there existed an ontological equality of humankind. This equality entailed a universal republic and the state was a moral enterprise devoted to the common good of citizens; not merely a framework for the pursuit of interests or for the exercise of an absolute sovereign will. 1