Dignity: The Last Bastion of Liberalism

WHEREAS 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 … ¹

So pronounces the Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, approved 48–0 (with eight abstentions) on December 10, 1948, by the 56 member states of the United Nations, linking “the inherent dignity and … equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” to the foundation of global freedom, justice, and peace.

This surely is an ambitious mouthful, but it was an auspicious moment. Considerable disappointment followed, what with the Cold War and the many lives lost in the wrenching process of decolonization, but not utter disaster (at least for those not tormented or killed). Yet the intellectual promise of the Universal Declaration has been difficult to parse in theory or enact in practice in subsequent years. Nearly as much ink has been spilled as practical work done in relation to human rights since 1948, and the phrase now embodied in international law has reached new peaks of popularity in the wake of the end of the Cold War. Thus a newly operational International Criminal Court (2002) can indict persons for “crimes against humanity,” “war crimes,” and “genocide,” even though the absence of the United States, China, and Russia as signatories considerably weakens its authority and scope. Indeed, another effect of the abundant attention given to human rights in public rhetoric and politics has been the elusiveness of clarity about what they mean. Of late, exasperation has set in about ever stabilizing the meaning of human rights, except in judicial settings. And in fact human rights have recently suffered more intense argumentative assaults on their coherence and reach than at any point since their codification by the United Nations, if not the French Revolution. Where do human rights come from? Is their orientation primarily Western, hence ideological? Or are they primarily a moral fig leaf for justifying the real power of a few states, professions, and corporations over millions or billions of human beings, as well as the work of poorly funded (but nonetheless important) non-governmental organizations mostly dependent on Western philanthropy? If there can be good answers to these questions, such that human rights can lay claim not only to being a hook for ambitious intellectuals and states but a meaningful tool of global political ethics, what, indeed, is the relation of their transpolitical, “human” dimension to their political dimension as a manifestation of “rights” that collective institutions ought to protect and promote as best they can? ²

Given this barrage of questions, political philosophers and theorists have sought to get behind or around the discourse of human rights, looking for firmer ground. That ground, for many, has become the notion of human dignity. During the past year, major presses have published five books that include “dignity” in the title, have it serve as the focus of analysis, or associate it with a psychological model for resolving human conflict. There’s also a new, picturesque book of photographs, titled Dignity, honoring indigenous peoples and the fiftieth anniversary of Amnesty International. ³

Apart from the basic intellectual challenges noted above, the growth industry of intellectual interest in dignity by professionals perched in the academy seems intent on linking traditional Western notions of liberalism (discussed below), tapping dignity’s prevalence in religious discourse, and drawing on its ability to signify both distinction and human value to define global ethics. In any event, the general phenomenon and the particular books reviewed here deserve our attention.

The spate of new books on dignity not only refers to but also transcends the confines of traditional questions about human rights, such as: how can we (if...