Dignity as Worth

In preparing my paper for APSA, I have been thinking a lot about the concept of dignity, as possible way to frame this paper, so that it is something more than just about Grotius and Pufendorf.  I started working my through some of the recent literature on human dignity - Jeremy Waldron's Tanner Lectures at Berkeley, Michael Rosen's Benedict Lectures, and recent books by Martha Nussbaum, Avishai Margalit, and George Kateb on the topic.  I am looking forward to Steve Darwall's new book on these points.

I've learned a lot from this literature, but also perplexed by some of the choices that contributors to this literature have made.  A couple of initial thoughts as I've been going through this literature (all subject to revision).  With the exception of Waldron, they seem much too confident in claiming that dignity is an egalitarian value.  If anything, I'm finding 'dignity' to function as a rather inegalitarian concept that, over time, became democratized, so that there is the illusion of an equality that never was really there to begin with.

In support of this egalitarian interpretation of dignity, some often claim that dignity is a Christian value.  But anybody who knows the liturgy of the Mass will well know that we are reminded, in the Prayer of Humble Access at every celebration of the Mass, of our indignity - or rather, our unworthiness (cp. Matthew 3:11, 8:8; Luke 3:16, 7:7)

 

Or the Anglican variant in the Book of Common Prayer: 

The Greek New Testament uses variants of the term, ἀξία, in Koine Greek, which the Vulgate renders as digne and dignitas.  ἀξία, I'm learning, has some interesting sources that actually seem to move far away from what 'human dignity' is supposed to mean in liberal political theory.

Consider Aristotle.  ἀξία is the vocabulary of merchants haggling in the marketplace, trying to determine how much a good or service is really worth.  His example in the Ethics is that of houses and bedsteads:

Even people can be measured in terms of their ἀξία, a point that Aristotle makes in the context of his discussion of the greatness of soul.  Great men are worthy of great honor.  To deny such men of that honor is not only an indignity, but even an injury.  

Grotius (once again) is most interesting for me on this point, for several reasons.  His annotations on the Greek New Testament trace these various connections between ἀξία and dignitas.  But most striking to me is that he is perhaps the first to explicitly connect ἀξία and dignitas to his theory of subjective claim-rights.   

Here is a passage I presented before:

I never paid much attention to the work that 'dignitas' was doing in this passage.  But his analysis of 'worthiness' (or waerdigheid - as he puts it in his treatise on Roman-Dutch Law) reveals the point he wants to make.  It is a theory of an imperfect claim-right that militates against the core liberal value of equality.