Dignity and vulnerability: strength and quality of character

Abstract

In this significant addition to moral theory, George Harris challenges a view of the dignity and worth of persons that goes back through Kant and Christianity to the Stoics. He argues that we do not, in fact, believe this view, which traces any breakdowns of character to failures of strength. When it comes to what we actually value in ourselves and others, he says, we are actually far more Greek than we are Christian. At the most profound level, we value ourselves as natural organisms, as animals, rather than as godlike beings who transcend nature. The Kantian-Christian-Stoic tradition holds that if we are fully able to realize our dignity as Kantians, Christians or Stoics we would be better, stronger people, and therefore less vulnerable to character breakdown. This text offers an opposing view, that sometimes character breaks down not because of some shortcoming in it but because of what is good about it, because of the very virtues and features that give us our dignity. If dignity can make us fragile and vulnerable to breakdown, then breakdown can be benign as well as harmful, and thus the concepts of human dignity embedded in the tradition leading up to Kant are deeply mistaken. Harris proposes a foundation of belief in human dignity in what we can actually know about ourselves, rather than in metaphysical or theological fantasy. Having gained this knowledge, we can understand tha source of real strength.