Abstract
What's So Special About Human Dignity?
Highlights
This paper was first written for a workshop held at the University of Chicago, which I coorganized with Pablo Gilabert
I am extremely grateful to all of them, and to Jeremy Waldron for allowing me to audit his law seminar on “HUMAN DIGNITY” in the spring of 2012, which got me started on this topic
Talk about human dignity is talk about the kind of dignity attributable to human beings; it need not make any assumptions, positive or negative, about the dignity attributable to other animals
Summary
Peter Berger, “On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor,” Revisions: Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1983), 172–81. As several others note, it turns out to be more illuminating to focus on the continuities between the “old” notion of honor and the “new” concept of universal human dignity.[32] Much like insults to honor, violations of human dignity characteristically humiliate, shame, or degrade They attack our social standing, above all—undermining our sense of pride and belonging in society. Unlike its more benign counterpart, it strips its victim of something ordinarily considered (and that we expect Sheila herself considers) crucial to one’s pride or self-respect: independent mobility In this regard, the sheer impact of the crime degrades its victim in a way that ordinary cases of bicycle theft do not. Once again, from the idea that to humiliate or degrade is to “reduce from a higher to a lower rank, to depose from a position of honor or estimation,” we can identify at least three general ways of perpetrating this kind of harm
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