In the image of
Dignity. We got an interesting discussion in the comments, and I suddenly realized (belatedly) that I could think of contexts in which the word ‘dignity’ wouldn’t repel me: contexts and situations in which people have managed to hang onto their dignity despite the assaults of other people or of nature. I probably still wouldn’t use it myself, but I would see the point of it.
But where this started was with Leon Kass; that’s why potentilla asked the question that prompted my series of them. I left Kass out of the dignity post, because I wanted to talk about the idea more generally and also (partly) more loosely. I wanted to free associate, partly. But now let’s look at Kass some more.
He uses the word no fewer than eight times in that speech, and it’s fundamental to his whole strawman indictment of ‘scientism’. He uses it to give force and weight and a kind of prestige to his alarmist fantasies about ‘soul-less’ scientism.
Scientific ideas and discoveries about living nature and man, perfectly welcome and harmless in themselves, are being enlisted to do battle against our traditional religious and moral teachings, and even our self-understanding as creatures with freedom and dignity…All friends of human freedom and dignity—including even the atheists among us—must understand that their own humanity is on the line…Instead, bioprophets of scientism…issue bold challenges to traditional understandings of human nature and human dignity…In order to justify ongoing research, these “humanists” are willing to shed not only traditional religious views but any view of human distinctiveness and special dignity, their own included…Here, in consequence, would be the most pernicious result of the new biology…the erosion, perhaps the final erosion, of the idea of man as noble, dignified, precious, or godlike, and its replacement with a view of man, no less than of nature, as mere raw material for manipulation and homogenization.
The whole long speech is a textbook example of the attempted argument ‘this would be bad therefore it is false,’ and it also relies repeatedly and consistently on absurd false dilemmas. Every few paragraphs we’re given a choice between two alternatives as if two exhausted the possibilities when in fact there are myriad other possibilities. The whole ‘freedom and dignity or scientistic reductionism’ binary is the overarching false dilemma, of course, and the one between ‘ the idea of man as noble, dignified, precious, or godlike’ and ‘mere raw material’ is one of the many supporting false dilemmas. And that string of adjectives hints at why I basically dislike the word. I don’t and don’t want to think of humans as noble, dignified, or godlike. Valuable (rather than precious), yes, but the other items, no. And that doesn’t force me to choose ‘mere raw material’ instead – why the hell would it? Leon Kass just says it would, he never explains why it would.
And that makes me suspicious of the word and its uses. I suspect that it’s the kind of word that people like Kass reach for when they want to snow credulous audiences with grand verbiage. People like Kass meaning people making fundamentally bad, sloppy, emotive arguments; people relying on rhetoric and tingly words to make their case for them because nothing else will do it.
Norm doesn’t agree.
One oddity of Ophelia’s argument, as it strikes me, is that it holds to the meaninglessness of ‘human dignity’ while at the same time insisting that humans shouldn’t be degraded or humiliated. But ‘degrade’ carries on its face that there is a standard in light of which some person is being reduced…But if we believe – as Ophelia does believe – that there are general standards valid for the treatment of all human beings and just because of their humanity, then it seems logical to say that there are general forms of human degradation and humiliation and that human dignity is the thing they assault.
I don’t think so. I think the standard in light of which some person is being reduced is that of the ordinary average ‘normal’ state of affairs – I don’t even think it necessarily has a name. It’s just how things ought to be, how we feel all right; degradation and humiliation are intrusions on that. I don’t think when we are humiliated or degraded we normally think of our ‘dignity’. I still think dignity is in a way asking too much – I think we can claim a right not to be degraded but I’m not sure we can claim a right to dignity. But it’s also true that I don’t object to that usage, whereas I do object to Kass’s. I think Kass’s really is meaningless, because I think humans don’t have dignity in the sense that he means it – dignity such that it’s a violation of it for a cognitive scientist to research emotions or morality. His idea of it depends, as he says all too frankly in the closing pages, on our being ‘in the image of God.’ I’m leery of the word because it seems to be all tangled up with nonsense on stilts of that kind.
I think what’s most grating about this use of “human dignity” is that it’s not really “human” dignity at all: Kass sees the fundamental worth of human beings as such to be an endowment to humans rather than a property of humans. We only have worth or value because the imaginary friend preferred by Leon Kass values us! This is just the positive corollary of that tired old anti-atheist rhetoric about morality: “In the absence of God, human life has no value,” declare the theists – which clearly implies that any value human life may have comes from God and ONLY from God.
Even aside from the pesky fact of God’s nonexistence, this view is profoundly mistaken. Such a derivative, secondary conception of human dignity/innate worth clearly undermines and opposes what it purports to advance. Human worth is not in fact innate or intrinsic on such a view, it is purely derivative from and dependent on God valuing us.
If only we could harness Kass to do something useful! But sadly, the steaming piles of manure that spill forth every time he opens his mouth are too metaphorical to serve as fertilizer.
Good point.
“it is purely derivative from and dependent on God valuing us.”
And on our being “in the image of God” – so we’re special and hotcha because we’re like someone else, rather than because we are what we are. It’s all very referred.
Yeah, as G said before, dignity has a whole cluster of meanings and I think they can all be put in two camps. A dignity that comes from within, that’s cultural and manifests itself through behaviour and an intrinsic dignity that bestowed magically from without, the universe, god or our nature as human beings.
In the other thread you asked what other languages have to say about this and you know what? I am not sure, really. It’s possible that the French dignité puts the emphasis more on this “behavioural” aspect, on dignity as something that is shown rather than given or taken (the adjectives could actually be more interesting: dignify against digne) but it may only be a reflection of my thinking that French is the superior language!
This use of the fuzziness of “dignity” to attack “scientism” is not new anyway. You only have to read the closing pages of C.S. Lewis’s Out Of The Silent Planet to find the same kind of argument, especially when it comes to future alterations of the human form. It was a stupid objection then (and I am not saying there are no good objections), it is a stupid objection now.
I don’t think it’s fair to beat up on a perfectly decent word just because an idiot like Kass misuses it…
Oh but it’s not just because Kass misused it, it’s a word that I’ve had reservations about for years. Kass merely prompted the current expression of the reservations.
Thanks Arnaud. I know it’s not new, and Lewis is just the kind of guy who would use it. (If only he’d stuck to the lit crit, where he really did have interesting things to say.)
Human worth is not in fact innate or intrinsic on such a view, it is purely derivative from and dependent on God valuing us.
Human worth is in fact purely derivative from and dependent on us humans valuing ourselves. Or rather, some of us humans valuing some others of us humans, from time to time. Does that make it either innate or intrinsic? I would say not.
Well, “intrinsic value” – as opposed to “extrinsic value” – is generally taken to mean an end or thing valued for its own sake rather than for the sake of something else: For example, money is not valuable in itself, but is valued for what we can do with it. So yes, insofar as each person values herself or himself for her or his own sake, that value is intrinsic. Or, to put it in semi-Kantian terminology, one doesn’t value one’s own existence and/or flourishing as a means to some end, but as an end-in-itself.
Innate isn’t just a synonym for intrinsic, it means something different. Generally, a property being innate is in contrast to being relational in some way. My height (5’9″) is an innate property, whereas my being taller than my mother is a property I have only in relation to some other entity (Mom). If our worth comes from (“is derivative from and dependent on,” to use the same language I used before) the value we place on ourselves, it isn’t relational, it is innate.
BTW, my intention is not merely to be pedantic or to correct potentilla. Terms like “intrinsic” and “innate” are often used in highly metaphorical or downright mystery-mongering ways, but they actually have concrete and useful meanings. The real and content-rich meanings of such words get glossed over and ignored by the mystery mongers (i.e. losers like Kass), so I thought that any potential confusion over such terms was worth clearing up.
Back again!
I’d say “dignity” is part of what constitutes “normal,” honestly. I don’t think “human dignity” makes us noble or godlike–“dignity” may in some circumstances have that connotation, but in the context of “human dignity” it really doesn’t. In the end, Ophelia, I think you’re equating “dignity” with something very different (and more grandiose? More pompous? More superficial?) than what people really mean when they talk of “human dignity.”
Leia, I think that there’s a disconnect between what Ophelia’s writing and what you’re reading. Maybe I’m the one who’s misreading, but I interpret her as saying that “dignity” CAN BE interpreted in these multiply ambiguous ways. She is not imposing any particular interpretation on it, but noting the various ways the word can be used – and therefore potentially misused. You keep talking about context, but do we want to open a lot of “context” and “interpretation” doors when talking about important moral matters? I think rather that we want to close off those doors to alternate meanings – both to be as clear as possible, and to keep anyone from sneaking other, less palatable meanings in through the side door. See my longer comment on the “Like bread” thread for more details on what I mean.
OB, this conversation about the word ‘dignity’ reminds me of a similar conversation I had years ago with an old lawyer friend about the word ‘Good’. He thought the word itself was meaningless, and pretty much represented the normal state of human affairs rather than some heightened state of existence.
For example, my friend said a person categorized as a ‘Good father’ was being a plain old ‘father’, but somehow over time we have decided to give a value to someone who does what they are supposed to do.
Now, there certainly can be a ‘bad father’, just as one can ‘degrade’ a person. But, just as in the case of the word ‘dignity’, it does not necessarily follow that a ‘good father’ is anything other than a ‘man who performs his fatherly duties’ – as if by doing so he had elevated himself to something more important than a protective and nurturing mother chimpanzee.