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Social scientists often make a distinction between honor and dignity. Both terms refer to a kind of moral worth, a form of esteem or respectability. But they differ in important ways.
Honor is extrinsic and alienable. Honor is based on reputation, on how others view and treat you. Honor can be lost — quite easily, in many cases, leading to the famous touchiness displayed by men of honor.
Dignity in contrast is intrinsic and inalienable. It does not depend on other’s good opinion and cannot be taken away. As Whitney Houston sang in 1985 (covering a song from 1977) “No matter what they take from me, they can’t take away my dignity.”
The Evolution of Dignity
The idea that all people share some baseline moral worth, one that exists independently of any other kind of social stature, isn’t universal. And this conception of dignity did not emerge overnight.
In his book Dignity: Its History and Meaning, philosopher Michael Rosen traces the history of the concept from ancient times. The English word dignity, and its relatives in Spanish (dignidad) and French (dignité), come from the Latin term dignitas. In ancient Rome, dignitas was one of the four cardinal virtues, alongside pietas, gravitas, and virtus.
Pietas, the root of the English word piety, meant fulfilling one’s duties – both to the gods, through religious observance, and to the family. Gravitas meant something like seriousness, a sense of responsibility and commitment to whatever one was doing. Virtus seems closest to the conception of honor found in honor cultures. While it might refer to a lot of things, strength and courage were at its core, and it was bound up with manliness, the root word vir meaning “man.” Dignitas, according to Rosen, referred broadly to high social status and the “honors and respectful treatment that are due to someone who occupied that position” (Rosen, p.11).
Dignitas did not yet resemble the modern meaning of dignity. It was linked to authority and had connotations of prestige and good name — hardly something inherent and inalienable. It was something for social elites to cultivate by holding office and performing admirably, and something that could be lost or taken away. Elites accused of crime, for instance, might turn to suicide rather than risk losing their dignitas in a public trial.
But even in the highly stratified world of pagan Rome there were strains of moral universalism that could sometimes influence the usage of dignitas. While Cicero’s early writings connect the term to social rank, in his later writings he uses the term to refer to the stature all humans have over other animals (Rosen, p.12). An emphasis on a certain baseline human worth, and even moral equality, also cropped up in Stoic philosophy, where even slaves were in some sense equals with other men.
The spread of Christianity would carry forward this universalizing tendency. Later theologians would sometimes ground any notion of common human worth in their belief we were all created by God in His image. But for a long time we still see the term dignitas and its linguistic relatives referring to a stature that some people have over others.
It’s not until the 1200s that philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas defines dignity as “something’s goodness on account of itself.” His conception was even broader than Cicero’s later uses, in that it could refer to the worth shared by all of God’s creations, human and non-human. It was also coupled with a notion that worth hinged on things being in their “proper place,” and so quite compatible with the hierarchy of nobles and commoners. Moral equality did not mean equality of wealth, prestige, or authority.
During the Renaissance we see thinkers now talking about different kinds of dignity possessed by different social ranks, or even the kinds of dignity found in different activities or things. In 1623 philosopher and jurist Francis Bacon referred to the dignity of learning, implying a usage more similar to “worth” or “value” than to social status, though he elsewhere used the word in this way as well.
By the 1700s, the old agrarian order was changing. Social stratification within Western societies began to decline. Enlightenment ideals about the fundamental equality and inherent rights of all men were gaining currency.
Into this milieu influential philosopher Immanuel Kant injected his own ideas about dignity – or rather the German word usually translated as dignity – as a value that was both inherent in and distinctive of human beings, something he thought stemmed for human autonomy and capacity for obeying a universal moral rule (the Golden one).
The new conception of dignity — inherent, distinctive, and universal — gained traction in a world of crumbling social hierarchies, a growing middle class, democratization, and egalitarian social movements. But the older meanings, such as those that emphasized that value came from being in the “proper” place, survived. French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that dignity consisted of knowing one’s station in life, while the writings of Pope Leo XIII indicate that the 19th century church advanced a conception of dignity as moral worth of all humans but followed Aquinas in qualifying that the worth stemmed from everyone fulfilling their duties within a social hierarchy.
And, of course, there were critics who attacked the concept of dignity in all its forms. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche tended to side with the ancients: Worth is neither inherent nor equally distributed but comes from great cultural achievements and military victories. In his view all this talk of the dignity of the common man or of manual labor was a sentimental illusion; ordinary manual labor was nothing but a degrading necessity.
But the egalitarian conception of dignity continued to grow in influence. By the 20th century it was a central concept in political and legal discourse, and something tightly coupled with the concept of rights.
Nowadays concept is often used, and taken to be central, to talking about human rights. It is not always articulated clearly, but the core logic in a lot of these human rights agreements is that if everyone has some inherent baseline worth as a human, then all deserved a baseline of equal treatment that respects this human worth. Court rulings and international conventions about the treatment of prisoners all appeal to this central assumption.
To Be Dignified
Dignity refers to some sort of universal shared moral worth. But, of course, people still make judgments about respectability based on how you conduct yourself. You might be entitled to a certain floor of respect just by being a human, but it doesn’t mean we can’t think you’re an asshole.
The kind of moral worth a culture emphasizes also shows up in how people make such judgments. In an honor culture, different sorts of wrongdoing — lying, stealing — might get branded dishonorable, but the core of honor is being brave, bold, and intolerant of disrespect. Being hot-tempered and quick to resort to aggression isn’t a character flaw in an honor culture. A higher level of belligerence and boastfulness is the norm.
Dignified conduct is marked by restraint and self-assurance. To be dignified is, at root, to be confident and secure in one’s intrinsic and inalienable worth, and to respect that of others. One should neither insult others nor overreact when they insult you. Indeed, the person who stoops to insult you is lowering himself, not lowering you.
In a 1989 article “Dignity, Rights, and Self-Control,” philosopher Michael J. Meyers describes dignified conduct as a kind of golden mean between subservience and belligerence, neither voluntarily lowering oneself nor having a chip on one’s shoulder. One neither gives up rights nor aggressively claims rights that were never seriously threatened.
The Limits of Dignity
Some years ago, Steven Pinker wrote an article entitled “The Stupidity of Dignity.” Here he echoed bioethicist Ruth Macklin in dismissing the concept as too vague and relativistic to be of any use in ethical discourse.
The article would be more accurately titled “the stupidity of government bioethicists” — his ire was focused on President Bush’s Council on Bioethics — but he had a point about the term being generally ill-defined and often used in contradictory ways. For example, one of the main targets of Pinker’s complaints was a member of the president’s council who had a strangely narrow conception of dignified conduct. Eating in public and licking ice cream cones, he said, were beneath human dignity.
The issue is that the concepts of dignity and dignified do not exist in isolation from other values. Thus legal scholar Neomi Rao notes that the idea of fundamental human worth is compatible with very different ideas about how best to recognize and respect that worth.
American legal tradition mostly guards it with negative liberty, respecting the individual’s autonomy and right to pursue their own ends unhampered by others. But people also make dignity-based arguments to forbid offensive speech, as it fails to respect the dignity of others. And people argue for various paternalistic policies to keep people from freely choosing to demean themselves. Rao writes:
Consider the much-discussed French case about dwarf throwing. Mr. Wackenheim, a dwarf, made his living by allowing himself to be thrown for sport. The French Ministry of the Interior issued a circular on the policing of public events with particular attention to dwarf tossing. In response to this, the mayors of Morsang-sur-Orge and Aix-en-Provence banned dwarf tossing events in their respective cities. Mr. Wackenheim challenged the orders on the grounds that they interfered with his economic liberty and right to earn a living. Eventually, the case went to the Conseil d'Etat (the supreme administrative court), which upheld the bans on dwarf tossing on the grounds that such activities affronted human dignity, which was part of the "public order" controlled by the municipal police.
But apparently the state telling him what to do wasn’t beneath his dignity. So exactly what sort of respect and self-respect does dignity demand for a person? How much restraint? Under what circumstances?
Part of the problem here might be that these moral concepts are such a basic part of a society’s moral culture that as points of agreement they go unstated and unnoticed. They tend to get explicitly deployed when people disagree, as various sides vie to stretch any positive-sounding term to fit their cause. I suspect contradictory interpretations are the fate of any abstract moral concept that has wide currency.
But I disagree these concepts are useless in moral or ethical reasoning. It’s just that no single concept or proposition is ever going to free one from the hard work of judging the right thing to do in concrete cases.
The concept of dignity as universal human worth does not free one from figuring out the specifics of laws, ethical guidelines, or social norms. And while the concept of dignified conduct as marked by restraint, self-assurance, and respect gives some rough behavioral guides, it leaves a lot of room for argument. The devil is in the details.
This post is part of a series considering aspects of moral culture. See also: