On the Relatively Recent Rise of Human Dignity

Gaymon Bennett’s new book, Technicians of Dignity, joins a wave of recent scholarship on dignity, as legal theorists, philosophers, political theorists, historians, and others have turned their attention to dignity in order to articulate more precisely what it is, to defend or critique some conception of it, or to figure out why we are talking about it so much now (see Kateb 2011, Rosen 2012, Waldron 2012, McCrudden 2013, Düwell 2014, Cornell and Friedman 2016). It does seem like dignity, or at least the word, is everywhere today. Consider two noteworthy appearances in mid-2015: on June 13, Médicins Sans Frontières (MSF) launched the Dignity I, a boat that would contribute to their search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean Sea (MSF 2015). Two weeks later, on June 27, The New York Times headline read, quoting Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, “‘Equal Dignity,’ 5–4 Ruling Makes Same-Sex Marriage a Right Nationwide” (New York Times 2015).

Dignity can refer to many different things. In the context of humanitarian efforts like those of MSF, the term can capture what people feel when they see images of refugees living in undignified conditions or children washing up on beaches: that this is no way for a human being to live, or to die. Here, the conditions for dignity are so radically threatened that what is at stake is whether the people involved will even survive, whether they are in a position to live a life fit for a human being at all. As valiant and essential as humanitarian rescue efforts are, critics worry that the mode of crisis in which humanitarian action operates can sometimes get extended in ways that simply “preserve existence while deferring the very dignity…it seeks” (Redfield 2005:346).

In the context of same-sex marriage and other legal cases, dignity is invoked to capture what it means to have equal status in the eyes of one’s fellow citizens and under the law. As Jim Obergefell, the lead plaintiff in the case, put it, referring to the fact that he was not allowed to put his name on his late husband’s death certificate: “No American should have to suffer that indignity” (Chappell 2015). Justice Kennedy agreed, but did not stop there. He not only affirmed the equal dignity of all citizens seeking access to the institution of marriage, but ran the risk of disparaging the lives of all sorts of unmarried people by expounding upon the dignity of marriage itself. In his dissenting opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas hit on a classic ambiguity in the concept of dignity when he insisted that it is “innate” and, therefore, “the government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.”¹ He was right about one thing: if dignity is an innate feature of human beings—an “inner, transcendental kernel” (Rosen 2012:9)—then surely nothing the government does can take that away. But other meanings of dignity were at stake in the case: what it means to have equal dignity under the law, to be treated with dignity, or have one’s dignity respected.²

How did we get here, to the point at which all sides of various debates in so many different contexts can appeal to the same term? In his book, Bennett aims not only to give us a better sense of when the appeal to dignity started to become central to political practice but also to analyze the underlying logic of dignitarian politics. Instead of contributing to first-order normative projects of defining human dignity, he focuses on the larger contexts for and political stakes surrounding those projects. Thus, he asks: What is at stake in the “politics of intrinsic worth”? How does advancing dignity in various contexts relate to modes of power? His contribution consists in systematically analyzing the relation between dignitarian politics and biopolitics, not with the aim of debunking the former as merely another mode of biopolitics...