Social Thought and Rival Claims to the Moral Ideal of Dignity

By Philip Hodgkiss

Dignity has a remarkable resonance in contemporary life. It is used as a touchstone to mark out what is deemed good, right or proper. In all walks of public life dignity is invoked as having a talismanic power to distil the final essence of human existence. Yet, in such public discourse, largely uninformed by the signal role dignity has played in ethical thought, we rarely become acquainted with the source of dignity's imputed magical powers. ‘Social Thought and Rival Claims to the Moral Ideal of Dignity’ is a sustained attempt to rectify this oversight by following the fortunes of the idea of dignity from its humble origins until it comes to represent in our time a universal ethical ideal.

Beginning by tracing the source of dignity’s occult status from its earliest appearance in the life and thought of ancient Greece, ‘Social Thought and Rival Claims to the Moral Ideal of Dignity’ proceeds to identify dignity in the theological ethics of early Christianity through to the late Middle Ages, Renaissance and early modern period, where dignity appears for the first time in secular thought. The second part of the book picks up the growing debate in the Enlightenment and romantic period and from that point onwards concentrates on following closely the unfolding significance of the idea and ideal of dignity in the classical thought of philosophy and sociology and in more recent perspectives.

In exploring the legacy from such sources, ‘Social Thought and Rival Claims to the Moral Ideal of Dignity’ distinguishes dignity from other related ethical notions such as respect for persons, duty and compassion as they appear on the respective agendas of distributive justice, human (and animal) rights and natural law and citizenship. The course of the discussion illustrates just how wide ranging recourse to dignity has become as an ethical ideal and explores the reasons behind its resurgent modern deployment. Ironically, while the concept of dignity has, indeed, begun to feature in a range of recent public policy debates, insights from evolutionary psychology and biology tell a very different tale: that dignity is quite misconceived. ‘Social Thought and Rival Claims to the Moral Ideal of Dignity’ culminates in an analysis of the reasons behind dignity’s recently acquired negative connotation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Apr 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781783087860

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Social Thought and Rival Claims to the Moral Ideal of Dignity

Social Thought and Rival Claims to the Moral Ideal of Dignity

Philip Hodgkiss

Anthem Press

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© Philip Hodgkiss 2018

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-784-6 (Hbk)

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CONTENTS

Preface and Note on Text Structure

Acknowledgements

Notes

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE AND NOTE ON TEXT STRUCTURE

The full story of dignity is extremely complicated and the picture often handsomely confused.

It was deemed impracticable, therefore, within the bounds of this volume to trace every shift in the development of secular thought concerning dignity; only episodes informing the course of the present study are afforded space. The decision to leave on one side religious and legal concerns was taken, regrettably, on the grounds of economy of scale. The first draft of this book incorporating such domains of influence, as well as a more extended historical contextualization, stretched to twice the size of the present volume. What has been gathered from the cutting-room floor will now have to wait for a later airing. Although it is not the intention to confront the issue of human rights, or natural law, for that matter, fully head on, both concerns inevitably tend to ‘shadow’ any ongoing discussion of dignity and will need to be brought to light when the context requires it. There have been other reasons for economy in coverage, most notably, when the decision was taken to just not ‘go there’. For example, there has been some debate in the literature about the merits of the case for ‘the evolution of ethics’ and, for that matter, ‘the ethics of evolution’ (see Raphael 1994, 115–29). At its most perfunctory, this might be taken to mean that ethics have just developed over time in the case of the former premise and that evolution is largely a good thing in the case of the latter. Moreover, as an adjunct to this kind of thinking, there has been debate as to whether certain moral or ethical states have sired others such as sympathy coming to be an impulsion for conscience. Such endeavour, apart from being highly speculative, is inordinately time consuming to no conclusive end, so mention, here, of any ‘evolutionary’ correlation of concepts is made only where it has quite obvious relevance. As it turns out, any tracing of the ‘evolution’ of dignity over historical time or its bearing on other concepts fashions a tapestry whereby the stitches are made largely of threads of supposition.

The structure of the book, then, is as follows.

Chapter One forms the introduction to the idea and ideal of dignity conceptually in order to ground the underlying assumptions of the discussion. An additional objective will be to distinguish the idea of dignity from other related concepts current in moral discourse (e.g. ‘justice’). This will serve to introduce one awkward and enduring question: Even after having established the conceptual credentials of dignity, can it still be worth retaining as of quite independent importance among a lexicon of related moral and ethical concepts? As we shall see, this question is at issue in the literature throughout.

Chapter Two traces developments in the world of antiquity, and from a consideration of various schools of philosophy in Ancient Greece, we can detect that not only is how to lead a ‘good’ life couched in recognizably ethical terms, but there is also the conception of an aesthetic of existence in which dignity has an implicit part to play. From the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance there is clear evidence in the literature of references to human dignity as a moral ideal, particularly as defined in terms of autonomy and freedom and increasingly in terms of human reason. Following on from the agenda set by Hobbes, the interventions of Descartes, Spinoza and Locke are encountered as they explore the tension between reason and the passions in ethical life.

Chapter Three begins by witnessing the work of the eighteenth-century ethical intuitionists, though it is with Hume, Smith and Rousseau that the philosophical canon becomes acquainted with the effective roles of pity, sympathy and compassion as facets of the moral order. Most crucial, however, is Kant’s emphasis on ‘duty’ in moral life, which introduces in the process the idea of respect and human dignity. What has turned out to be the disputed legacy of Kant will be reviewed in some detail, with the chapter taking up the criticisms most evident in the subsequent contributions of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

Chapter Four picks up, again, on the idea of natural law in its embrace of dignity as the discussion then turns to the substantive emergence of the state and, with it, the designation of the ‘citizen’. It will increasingly fall to the state to guarantee the rights and dignity of the citizen. We witness here, too, the birth of the concern with human rights as of substantive importance. While Kant and Hegel applauded the role of the state, a much more critical and jaundiced view is provided by Marx. One further substantive aspect of the chapter is to establish exactly what Marx took human dignity to denote in furthering his critique of capitalism and bourgeois morality.

Chapter Five considers the way in which classical sociology responded to the challenge of identifying the moral malaise of the new world order of capitalist industrialism. Disparate contributions from the end of the nineteenth century had a somewhat hidden common agenda: the identification of the essential vehicle of morality in a complex, industrial society – the dignity of the human subject. While philosophy, generally speaking, was detained by a range of related ethical concepts, sociology, perhaps because of the concern with the fate of the individual in industrial capitalism, cleaved to the idea of dignity more directly.The subtext of this chapter focuses on the crucial importance of the state in the further social and historical analysis of dignity.

Chapter Six examines the way in which certain reaches of existentialism and phenomenology, through emphasis on a type of ‘disclosure’, on ‘pre-reflection’ and on perception, created the necessary intuitive space to behold dignity. The focal point for these varied contributions, even in its direct repudiation, is the philosophy of Heidegger. Further contributions have located dignity in responsiveness to otherness lying ‘between’ individuals being beheld in the solicitude of the human face.

Chapter Seven evaluates the theorization of dignity in the thought of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory – in both its old and newer variants. The influences of Marx and Freud feature in high profile in the thought of Fromm, Marcuse and Adorno, where the present moment of a moral order predicated upon freedom, autonomy and selfhood is questioned. It is later, with Habermas, that this concern is replaced by the respective roles of communicative action and discourse ethics, which appears to result in the diminution of the ethical significance of the individual human subject. It would appear that more recent developments in philosophy and sociology have now come to question the existence of an ‘old-style’ individual possessed of consciousness and a self, with inevitable implications for an imputed moral personhood.

Chapter Eight examines the way in which the idea of dignity has increasingly featured in research on the world of work and focuses, in particular, on the contentious notion that the model of the citizen of political provenance can be imported into the workplace. The second part of this chapter looks at the way in which dignity has come to feature on the agenda of health and social care as the touchstone for promoting best practice.

Chapter Nine takes the opportunity of introducing to the debate a range of cases that hold no brief for dignity, each, in their own way, calling on qualitatively different kinds of testimony to bear witness to the nature of ethical life. This is not per se a radical critique of dignity but rather the articulation of alternatives in which dignity does not appear to feature. Certainly, there seems to be no intention of retaining human dignity, or its trope, human rights, as a significant heuristic device for representing ‘the moral’. By drawing on this range of literature it is possible to chart the mixed fortunes of the idea of dignity in social thought right up to the twenty-first century.

Chapter Ten forms the overall conclusion to the book.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The germ of the material that came to form substantive parts of Chapters Four and Five surfaced initially in the Sociological Review (see Hodgkiss 2013), and, in part, some of the content of Chapter Eight was included in Edgell et al. (eds), The Sage Handbook of the Sociology of Work and Employment (see Hodgkiss 2015). I am grateful to both of them for being given the opportunity of publishing at that stage my somewhat rudimentary thoughts on this topic. I would like to thank the following for instructive conversations and advice as my ideas developed around the issue of dignity: Malcolm Payne, Michael Tyldesley, Ken Mclaughlin, Rod Butler, Tom Cockburn and, in particular, Stephen Edgell, whose support and encouragement have proved invaluable in the pursuit of this task. Of course, all the shortcomings in the present study are purely of my own making, albeit fashioned unintentionally. This book is dedicated to my late parents.

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION: THE DISTINCTION OF DIGNITY

Reverence for life and being, for otherness, is something which can be taught or suggested very early. ‘Don’t kill the poor spider, put him out in the garden’. Even a use of ‘him’ or ‘her’ instead of ‘it’ may help […] Morality, as the ability or attempt to be good, rests upon deep areas of sensibility and creative imagination, upon removal from one state of mind to another, upon shift of attachments, upon love and respect for the contingent details of the world. (Murdoch 1992, 337)

I

Zygmunt Bauman has remarked quite astutely that a word has ‘a feel’ as well as a meaning (Bauman 2001, 1); we might be tempted to append that it has also a history. The relation between changes in society over historical time and the concomitant transformation of a concept that depicts something of intrinsic value in that society is complex and contingent. An attempt is made, here, to see if we can get any closer to a rounded, three-dimensional view of dignity by drawing on the historical record, on philosophy and social thought more widely and, finally, on contributions that present dignity in a rather more public and political light. We are at once faced with the question as to whether dignity is primarily an ethical–moral question, a politico–legal matter, a property of the normative order, an ontological phenomenon or, in itself, a force of nature. It may be all of these things at any one time, or, conspicuously, none of them. In considering what he calls the ‘compass of moral value judgements’, Friedrich Nietzsche lists dignity along with other ‘virtues’ he describes as being ‘sweet-sounding words’ (Nietzsche 2017, 210). If we were to take dignity as the case in point, he wonders whether it should be taken in itself, in its own right, or as seen from a certain perspective, or, even, in terms of its consequences (or, perhaps, its utility). Despite his disparagement of a ‘virtue’ like dignity, he is drawing out for us, here, the rounded, three-dimensional quality we might be looking for. At this point, however, answers to the questions he raises are not really forthcoming. What would seem certain is that dignity, as with the concept of alienation featured by Schacht (1971, 242), is actually what Alisdair MacIntyre called a ‘contrast concept’, so it is only through an implicit absence or negation that we come to be acquainted with it at all. Dignity is defined over and against what it is not, being conspicuous by its absence.

If we were to take the following as a quite startling illustration, certain features would begin to emerge. Clearly, we have in the following instance, dignity as the absence indicated by the ‘contrast concept’, but actually present are other significant dimensions that dignity has come to denote. C. L. R. James (1963) in The Black Jacobins paints the darkest of pictures of the purchase of slaves on the deck of a slave ship on arrival in the West Indies. Before making his purchase, the slave owner examined intimately each individual for any conceivable bodily defect, even stooping so far as to actually taste their perspiration (apparently, a sign of good health or otherwise): ‘Then in order to restore the dignity which might have been lost by too intimate an examination, the purchaser spat in the face of the slave’ (James 1963, 9). If there were to be a quintessential instance of a complete negation of dignity, then it may be sampled in this squalid exchange of bodily fluids. For, here, both parties are dispossessed of their humanity, and dignity is retained only by ravishing delusion (yet, the slave had some extrinsic value, and there will come a time in Western civilization, as we shall see, when even that will not pertain). Writing in 1790 on this same issue, Mary Wollstonecraft railed: ‘because our ignorant forefathers, not understanding the native dignity of man, sanctioned a traffic that outrages every suggestion of reason and religion, we are to submit to the inhuman custom, and term an atrocious insult to humanity the love of our country, and a proper submission to the laws by which our property is secured’ (Wollstonecraft 1995, 13). Quite remarkably for this period, Wollstonecraft uses the word dignity frequently in invective, and a quite startling range of meaning and inflexion ends up being deployed, sometimes perhaps even more nuanced in meaning than we could ever trace through here. Nevertheless, her idea of ‘the native dignity of man’ will become central.¹

So that we know exactly where we are going with this analysis, it is helpful to think of the idea of dignity as developing historically in three dimensions that largely coexist today. Traditionally, in common parlance, the major connotations appear to be: first, dignity as denoting an exclusive place or position in a social rank order approximating a status held by someone or, in effect, their social standing. The ‘Prologue’ to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has it that the two households of Montague and Capulet are ‘both alike in dignity’. This is manifestly dignity as status or social standing – either term could have served to replace dignity and retain the same meaning. Thus, dignity was originally seen as the prerogative of the dominant in society and associated with privilege and exclusivity – it was, in effect, the touchstone of inequality. Thomas Hobbes supposes that the worth of a man is, like all things, ‘his price’, whereas the public worth of a man, the value placed on him by the commonwealth, is commonly called their ‘DIGNITY’ (Hobbes 1962, 115–16).While for Hobbes, dignity had denoted a distinction by name or title, Kant refers to ‘civic dignities’ (Kant 1991, 127) that amount to the titled positions and roles within the order of the state. The idea of someone being a ‘dignitary’ (a magistrate is Kierkegaard’s example [Kierkegaard 1959, 1: 162]) suggests this, and the word ‘dignitatum’, quite literally, means an ‘office’ of some sort.Hegel (1971), for his part, proceeded to see dignity (honour) as stemming from what people are – their work, their trade, their position. Interestingly, and overlaying two of the connotations discussed here, Hegel refers at one point to the ‘dignity of wifehood’ (Hegel 1977, 288). This, however, is not just a static attribution as people act out the given social status. Dignity can come to be the pride that someone presumes and, in this sense, is something that someone might choose to ‘stand on’. Rousseau in The Confessions, for example, refers at one point to having stood on his dignity (Rousseau 1996, 96). If someone maintains dignity, this amounts to ‘the look’, composure and bearing associated with, or expected of, a particular person (of a certain status, sex or age). The implication of this is that they are always in danger of losing such dignity in the eyes of others.We can see this in Aristotle (1998, 93), who refers to dignity in the context of one’s bearing (a becoming display of honour and status) in relation to those superior or inferior to oneself.In modern times, and in contrast to his substantive definition that ties human dignity to respect for truth, Marcel (1963) has very aptly referred to a ‘decorative conception’ of human dignity to do with status, display and social distance. Why people see others as possessing dignity in this sense is a pre-eminently sociological question. More appropriately viewed as indicating status (social honour), certain largely occupational groups appear to monopolize prestigious positions such as doctors, lawyers, managing directors and so forth. There appears to be a rough and ready consensus on this in people’s estimation, and though the refuse collector (dustman) may not be particularly highly regarded in terms of such a scaling, this does not extend to the evaluation of them as a person. Significantly, Rawls establishes a distinction between ‘the moral worth’ of persons, which depends upon the degree to which they comply with principles of justice, and dignity, which, in a Kantian sense, persons possess independently of their moral worth and concomitant actions (see Freeman 2007, 475–76).

Second, while dignity can be displayed in one’s bearing as in Aristotle’s account, it is also, quite crucially, a bearing on a moral compass. In fact, dignity has been viewed both as an intrinsic property of a particular individual and as an ethical phenomenon pertaining to humanity in a more abstract sense. Dignity can, thus, be a highly particularized facet of someone’s personality not everyone is given to; in this guise, it remains merely suggestive of human dignity as a universal attribute. As we shall see, Marcus Aurelius uses dignity often in the sense of an intrinsic property of the esteemed individual person.In Concerning the Principles of Morals (1975), David Hume refers to what he calls the ‘companionable’ virtues and identifies, among other qualities, ‘a noble dignity’ (277) and a ‘dignity of mind’ (314) as typifying the best side of a man’s character and conduct (see 252–53).On the rare occasions he mentions it, Adam Smith, too, sees dignity, or the lack of it, in terms of a man’s character. Yet, extending out beyond this personal attribution, he remarks that the hope and expectation of the life to come so deeply rooted in human nature ‘can alone support its lofty ideas of its own dignity’ (Smith 2009, 154).Kierkegaard, for instance, was to remark that ‘the experience of choosing imparts to a man’s nature a solemnity, a quiet dignity, which never is entirely lost’ (Kierkegaard 1959, 1: 181). In this regard, we might be given to resort to certain turns of phrases such as ‘she bore adversity with a quiet dignity’. In addition, at this interpersonal level, there may be a more proactive assertion of the right to have one’s dignity recognized, with an implicit, sometimes explicit, demand that one’s intrinsic worth be admitted. In a great deal of recent literature (e.g. as reviewed by Bolton 2007), dignity is construed as the intrinsic feeling of being of worth, or, more ambitiously, the feeling of being a being of worth. This would seem to imply ‘self-regard’, ‘self-respect’ and even, perhaps, ‘self-esteem’. Various situations or experiences affect the self to the extent of confirming or disconfirming their evaluative or qualitative sense of themselves. The point to bear in mind is that in this guise dignity is quite subjective, with everything directed inward towards the subject; the subject is not viewed as looking outward towards specific others – except to confirm their own thoughts on the matter. The effect of this very singular announcement of ‘my dignity’ is almost a rehearsal of the ‘decorative’ dimension of dignity indicated previously. In effect, the interplay between the various dimensions of dignity has a material effect itself. For example, it is the play (and pretence) of something approximating the ‘decorative’ description that can disguise the Other, hiding them from us and confounding our ability to participate in an extrinsic ‘declaration’ that recognizes the dignity of the Other as the source of our own.

Thus, it is with a third, more universal property of dignity that the present study is primarily concerned, and it is in this, what we shall call, ‘declarative’ sense that dignity first takes on a moral and ethical significance and, then, assumes a well-defined political and legal status. This is dignity coming to be seen as inherent in humanity intrinsically and as embodying a propensity towards interpersonal recognition. This third dimension of dignity, whenever and wherever it is rehearsed, has an implicit normative and moral connotation. It suggests a certain quality, something of worth, something to be universally respected. At that moment, it comes to denote an abstract ethical ideal – in need of a quite independent interpretation in its own right. But to where might we trace the origins of this quite specific concern with the third dimension of dignity? As we have seen, Mary Wollstonecraft was employing the term in this sense in the last decade of the eighteenth century, but Schopenhauer (2010) claims in a footnote that the first systematic deployment of ‘dignity’ was by G. W. Block. (E. F. J. Payne, translator of Schopenhauer’s On the Basis of Morality, confirms in a footnote that ‘G.W. Block in his A New Foundation for the Philosophy of Morals [Neue Grundlegung zur Philosophie der Sitten], 1802, appears to have been the first to make the conception of the dignity of man expressly and exclusively the foundation stone of ethics, and accordingly to have built an ethical system on it’ [Schopenhauer 1995, 100–101].)Nevertheless, there is some evidence that it is with Kant that the idea of dignity of man, at both an interpersonal and a universal level, had begun to develop an irresistible momentum. Just to really set us thinking about these distinctions in the meaning of dignity, Kant, at one point, refers to human dignity as if it were actually a status per se, announcing that ‘humanity itself is a dignity’ (Kant 1991, 225). Reflecting on Kant’s lofty claim for ‘humanity’, perhaps we should be asking ourselves just how universally applicable this third dimension of dignity might actually turn out to be. We have seen that there might be a problem in this regard with the slave, but what of our fellow non-human creatures not blessed with any social standing or, even, any possible inclination to stand on their dignity? By way of a digression, then, we can allow ourselves to meet the living, breathing proof of what should be a genuinely universal constituency of the third dimension of dignity.

In the later sixteenth century, in his essay ‘On Cruelty’, Montaigne rehearsed his feeling of distress at wanton cruelty to animals: ‘Considering that one and the same Master has lodged us in this place to serve Him, and that they as well as we are of His family, it is justified in enjoining us to show them some regard and affection’ (Montaigne 1993, 187). He continues: ‘We owe justice to men, and kindness and benevolence to all other creatures who may be susceptible of it’ (189).Yet, at this time in France, sack loads of cats could be tipped out onto a bonfire at a festival celebration, and not long afterwards Descartes was reputedly to have thrown a cat out of a window in demonstration of the fact that such a creature worked only in mechanical terms and was, in effect, a soulless automaton.Before the end of the seventeenth century, and in stark contrast to Descartes, Leibniz was to affirm that ‘all creatures have impressed on them a certain mark of the divine infinity, and that this is the source of many wonders which amaze the human mind’ (Leibniz 1973, 108).In the middle of the eighteenth century, Rousseau advises us that being destitute of intelligence and liberty, animals cannot recognize natural law, but as they partake in

some measure of our nature, in consequence of the sensibility with which they are endowed, they ought to partake of natural right; so that mankind is subjected to a kind of obligation even toward the brutes. It appears, in fact, that if I am bound to do no injury to my fellow-creatures, this is less because they are rational than because they are sentient beings: and this quality, being common both to men and beasts, ought to entitle the latter at least to the privilege of not being wantonly ill-treated by the former. (Rousseau 1968, 158)

While in the late eighteenth century, Jeremy Bentham made a strong pro-animal case stating that the question to ask was not whether animals could reason but whether they could suffer, Schopenhauer, in the nineteenth, berated both Kant and Christianity for excluding animals from the moral order. In his view, both parties had conspicuously failed to recognize the eternal essence existing in every living thing, shining forth, as he holds forth in a dazzling phrase, ‘with inscrutable insignificance from all eyes that see the sun!’ (Schopenhauer 1995, 96).Theodor Adorno, too, saw ‘the lightening up of an eye or some tail-wagging as fractures in total negativity that point beyond themselves [… which] disperses the context of immanence, creation, and in revealing an animal solidarity (affinity) opens a space of possibility which no intentional doing can by itself bring about: creaturliness as the material a priori of humanity’ (Bernstein 2001, 440).

Rachels’s (1990) case was that Darwinian evolutionism had exposed the tendency in philosophy and elsewhere to work to an entrenched speciesism based on the premise that human beings have exclusive claim to moral dignity. While Rachels sees this as based on the belief that man is a being made in God’s image and that reason distinguishes man from animals, he holds that human beings differ from animals in having both rights and duties, while animals have only the former.Following up on this, Raphael observes, quite astutely:

When the concept of human dignity is used nowadays, as for example in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it refers to the having of duties as well as rights; and while many people jib at speaking of animal rights they do not deny that human beings owe duties to animals. It would never enter their heads to think that dignity is required for being the object of a duty. (Raphael 1994, 128)

Reflecting on the moral dilemma we face in knowing how to treat other animals, with the potential for creating pain and suffering, Daniel Dennett emphasizes our obligations to our fellow creatures and remarks on there being ‘perfectly good reasons for treating all living animals with care and solicitude’ (Dennett 1993, 453). These ‘perfectly good reasons’ are to confirm and reinforce what he describes as ‘our belief environment’, but this turns out not to be all that culturally uniform. The problem with subsuming what it is to suffer to the capacity for reason that we find rehearsed in Dennett (1993, 448–54) is that it sidesteps the thorny issue of the dispatching of creatures for human food consumption according to certain religious rites. We must assume that a lingering death in the abattoir without an efficient coup de grâce increases suffering. This is not suffering as being denied or deprived of a quality of a projected life experience, as Dennett might have it, but suffering involving actual pain and increased levels of distress. Indeed, any debate on this question of the precise manner in which a creature meets its end seems to hang on what we take suffering to mean rather than the import of a sliding scale of reasoning capacity.

Recognition by human beings of the dignity of their fellow creatures is the means to the recognition of such worth in themselves. A loss of human dignity coming by way of mistreatment of our fellow non-human creatures has counterpointed the very idea of an exclusive human dignity. Peter Singer (1997) has intimated that man, as a focus of dignity, appears in the idea of ‘the Great Chain of Being’ before re-emerging in a different form in European humanism of the Renaissance.² Singer has been critical of the idea of a distinctive intrinsic human dignity. For him, the presupposition of a distinctive intrinsic human dignity is resorted to when philosophers’ thought process, logic and reasoning fail them; it is, for him, a fine phrase for someone who has run out of arguments. He seeks to foreground intrinsic human dignity as forming an intellectualized support for speciesism. Moreover, those he would seek to reprimand in this regard often stress autonomy, agency and the ‘richness and value’ of human life as exclusively definitive of what it is to be human. We have, here, only a matter of degree, not difference in kind.Joanna Bourke has reviewed the literature in the area of animal rights in some detail, remarking that ‘proponents of animal rights insist that animals should be given rights in harmony with their interests and dignity’ (Bourke 2011, 175). The debates generated, she suggests, have been ‘lively’, often focusing on interests as being of a relative nature given the genus, somewhat bringing to mind the old idea of the Great Chain of Being. Conversely, anti-speciesists may promote the treating of non-human creatures in terms of strictly human legalistic–ethicalized practice and procedures – as if human sentience was a universal-universal!

The ‘decorative’ conception of dignity, concerned with status and social standing, can be seen as primarily cultural, having all the trappings of historical specificity. Dignity appears, here, as distinction. And can be seen as such. Dignity as reason can be clearly seen in word and deed, which, as we shall see, is also the case for Kant as dignity comes to be ‘spirited away’, leaving only the demands of duty. Though still speculation, it would seem highly probable that the idea of dignity in the third dimension we are considering, here, made its first appearance on the historical stage in the case of life and death.

The foetus in the womb has a close cohabitee – dignity. Amid the anxiety and joy of childbirth, we might not notice the ‘assisted’ delivery of a sibling ethical ideal. A lung-bursting welcome cry from a new being snaps dignity to life. If this precious moment has not come to pass, the inquest of dignity is still to be convened. As Sartre attests (see Chapter Six), dignity would not attach itself in this way to a stone, even though hearts may be sometimes turned to stone. For if the being to which dignity has become attached