The Social Ontology Of Human Dignity

Abstract

The Universal Declaration on Human Rights (1948) begins with the striking claim that the ‘recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world’. Rather than use words that individualise and universalise in abstract terms, the Declaration describes humanity as an extended family, knit together by ties that are personal, natural and communal. Despite this, the rights enshrined within the Declaration and other international human rights instruments have generally been understood in a way that prioritises the rights of individuals, and the concept of human dignity is often cited in a way that connects it with individual autonomy. However, a close examination of these instruments shows them to presuppose a social ontology in which human beings are not merely isolated individuals, but constituted as members of communities at familial, local, regional, national and global scales. An exploration of this communal embedding of the dignity of all members of the human family has implications for how international human rights are understood, particularly in controversial cases where the rights of human beings conceived as individuals have to be harmonised with the rights of human beings living in community with others. A better understanding of the social ontology presupposed by international human rights law is therefore a prerequisite for addressing problems of harmonisation of this kind.Noting that the individualistic aspects of human rights law are often said to reflect Western influence, this paper traces the historical development of the idea of human dignity in classical, medieval, reformed and modern Western thought. It is argued that while the older classical conception of dignity understood it to be an attribute that set some classes or groups of human beings apart from others, the idea was transformed under the influence of Stoic philosophy and especially Christian theology into an attribute possessed by all human beings by virtue of their created nature. In the early and later medieval and reformed perspectives, human dignity was understood to be an attribute of all human persons, conceived not as autonomous and atomised individuals, but as embedded in a great variety of associations and communities. Moreover, in the classical, medieval and reformed conceptions alike, dignity was considered to be something that can never be separated from one’s moral responsibilities as a human being called upon to perform the duties associated with one’s particular callings and stations in life. It is only in certain modern conceptions that human dignity has become disassociated from the qualities of one’s character and from the associations and communities in which human beings are naturally embedded.It follows that international human rights law, insofar as it recognises a social ontology which is simultaneously individualistic, associational and communal, is not entirely oriented to modern Western atomising conceptions of human dignity, but embraces older Western and possibly wider non-Western conceptions as well.