On the Relatively Recent Rise of Human Dignity

Abstract

Gaymon Bennett, Technicians of Human Dignity: Bodies, Souls, and Making of Intrinsic Worth. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. 338 pp.Gaymon Bennett's new book, Technicians of Dignity, joins a wave of recent scholarship on dignity, as legal theorists, philosophers, political theorists, historians, and others have turned their attention to dignity in order to articulate more precisely what it is, to defend or critique some conception of it, or to figure out why we are talking about it so much now (see Kateb 2011, Rosen 2012, Waldron 2012, McCrudden 2013, Duwell 2014, Cornell and Friedman 2016). It does seem like dignity, or at least word, is everywhere today. Consider two noteworthy appearances in mid2015: on June 13, Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) launched Dignity I, a boat that would contribute to their search and rescue operations in Mediterranean Sea (MSF 2015). Two weeks later, on June 27, The New York Times headline read, quoting Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, 'Equal Dignity,' 5-4 Ruling Makes Same-Sex Marriage a Right Nationwide (New York Times 2015).Dignity can refer to many different things. In context of humanitarian efforts like those of MSF, term can capture what people feel when they see images of refugees living in undignified conditions or children washing up on beaches: that this is no way for a human being to live, or to die. Here, conditions for dignity are so radically threatened that what is at stake is whether people involved will even survive, whether they are in a position to live a life fit for a human being at all. As valiant and essential as humanitarian rescue efforts are, critics worry that mode of crisis in which humanitarian action operates can sometimes get extended in ways that simply preserve existence while deferring very dignity...it seeks (Redfield 2005:346).In context of same-sex marriage and other legal cases, dignity is invoked to capture what it means to have equal status in eyes of one's fellow citizens and under law. As Jim Obergefell, lead plaintiff in case, put it, referring to fact that he was not allowed to put his name on his late husband's death certificate: No American should have to suffer that indignity (Chappell 2015). Justice Kennedy agreed, but did not stop there. He not only affirmed equal dignity of all citizens seeking access to institution of marriage, but ran risk of disparaging lives of all sorts of unmarried people by expounding upon dignity of marriage itself. In his dissenting opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas hit on a classic ambiguity in concept of dignity when he insisted that it is and, therefore, the government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.1 He was right about one thing: if dignity is an innate feature of human beings-an inner, transcendental kernel (Rosen 2012:9)-then surely nothing government does can take that away. But other meanings of dignity were at stake in case: what it means to have equal dignity under law, to be treated with dignity, or have one's dignity respected.2How did we get here, to point at which all sides of various debates in so many different contexts can appeal to same term? In his book, Bennett aims not only to give us a better sense of when appeal to dignity started to become central to political practice but also to analyze underlying logic of dignitarian politics. Instead of contributing to first-order normative projects of defining human dignity, he focuses on larger contexts for and political stakes surrounding those projects. Thus, he asks: What is at stake in of intrinsic worth? How does advancing dignity in various contexts relate to modes of power? His contribution consists in systematically analyzing relation between dignitarian politics and biopolitics, not with aim of debunking former as merely another mode of biopolitics, but, instead, by showing how dignitarian reasoning is in critical tension with biopolitical reasoning. …