Introduction
By Adrian Ma
The concept of dignity can often seem like a kind of rhetorical or theoretical skeleton key. From punishment for war crimes, to the legalization of gay marriage, to the provision of medical assistance in dying, dignity plays a key—if often understated—part in some of the biggest moral, legal, and political questions of our day. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document which helped popularize our modern conception of human dignity, refers in its preamble to the “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family [as] the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Dignity, in short, has an impressive resume—and a doubly intimidating job description.
Some might say too intimidating. In an essay entitled “The Stupidity of Dignity,” psychologist Steven Pinker calls dignity “a squishy, subjective notion, hardly up to the heavyweight moral demands assigned to it.” Yet even those who deny that dignity is stupid have advanced very different accounts of what it is. Is it an irreducible moral status that everyone, regardless of background, shares in virtue of their humanity? Is it a function of rationality, social status, or freedom? Or is it, in the end, simply a placeholder concept that can mean whatever we need it to mean?
The question of what, exactly, dignity is was the focal point of our latest Curiosity Café, moderated by Reshma Aser and yours truly. Below, I attempt a not-squishy, not-stupid reconstruction of some of the many ideas we shared and grappled with. But first:
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Curiosity Café Recap: Dignity
Community Survey
Upcoming Events
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Readings & Resources
Curiosity Café Recap: Dignity
By Adrian Ma
What is dignity? At our latest Curiosity Café, moderated by Reshma Aser and yours truly, we engaged in a collaborative exploration of the nature, origins, and uses of this idea. Along the way, we examined several wide-ranging case studies, including one on cannibalism which, reportedly, cost one of our directors an arm and a leg. (If you’re curious, the others concerned the dignity of non-human animals, medical assistance in dying, and a woman in Nazi Germany who ratted out her husband for his disparaging remarks about Hitler.1) Here’s a small—but only a small—selection of what you had to say:
I suffer an indignity when I am treated in ways that fail to recognize or make use of my full potential. It is undignified, for example, to be relegated to a position for which I am severely overqualified, or to be treated as though I am nothing more than this or that superficial quality or possession.
When we consider examples of undignified treatment, we often think of cases in which someone is receiving less than what their contributions are worth—such as when I am working a job for which I am significantly underpaid.
Often, in doing wrong, we surrender certain rights or privileges to which we were entitled prior to the wrongdoing; however, dignity is a kind of worth we retain even when we have done something wrong.
Even if considerations about dignity underlie many of our reasons for acting, few of us use the language of dignity in our day-to-day affairs. At the same time, we often think in terms that are dignity-adjacent, such as pride and self-respect, and that may express a deeper concern about living a dignified life.
Concerns about dignity tend to rise to the fore only when we encounter shocking examples of its violation, such as oppression, genocide, and rape.
This may suggest that when respect for dignity is doing its work, the value remains largely unconscious or invisible.
Dignity is intimately connected with freedom, with self-determination. Textbook cases of indignity tend to involve conditions, such as slavery, poverty, or illness, that directly or indirectly restrict our freedom.
Does it follow that actions or conditions that are autonomously chosen cannot be undignified? Does an indignity become any less of one when it is freely consented to? (What if, for example, I consented to be brutally killed and cannibalized?).
“Dignity” is often used to refer to some aspect of a person’s behaviour or bearing. It is associated, for example, with conformity to etiquette, with an upright posture, and with certain manners of dress. When we speak of dignity, we often slip between dignity in this external sense and dignity in the internal sense of a kind of universal moral worth or status. Does this slippage reflect an underlying conceptual confusion, or does it suggest that the two senses are more intimately connected than they might at first appear?
We should distinguish between the dignity of a person and the dignity of their surroundings or situation. While the internal dignity of a person can’t be reduced, their external dignity can. To call a person’s life undignified is not to say they lack dignity as a human being, but to say that the external aspects of their life—their work, their medical situation, their social status—do not reflect that underlying dignity.
What counts as dignified or undignified varies from one sociocultural context to another, and each society or culture likes to believe its own conception or standards of dignity to be universal.
Is there anything these various conceptions and standards all have in common? Perhaps there is some basic, universal human dignity that each society or culture expresses with different coats of paint.
If the meaning and standards of dignity are ultimately relative to sociocultural context, it follows that one’s conception of dignity can’t be objectively wrong. But don’t we want to preserve the ability to judge across societal and cultural lines? Can’t we denounce another culture’s practices as undignified, even if we do not belong to that culture ourselves?
Even if conceptions of dignity are socially constructed, they still derive from, and reflect, real, universal aspects of the human condition (which may have biological underpinnings), such as feelings of humiliation or shame.
We often speak of dignity as something everyone “has,” as though it is an existing thing we can point to and observe. But maybe, like equality, it is more of an aspiration, and much of our talk about dignity is more prescriptive than descriptive.
Thanks for reading. If you are one of the very few people who suffered the indignity of missing this café, I hope you will join us at the next one: You can find more information on that in the “Upcoming Events” section below. Finally, if you have attended any of our cafés (even if it wasn’t this one), and you have a few minutes to spare, please consider filling out our community survey. Your responses will go a long way toward helping us improve our events.
Community Survey
For those who’ve attended our Curiosity Cafés, please consider taking our brief community survey. We are conducting this survey to gather feedback on our events, and it should only take a few minutes to complete. Your responses are completely anonymous and will be invaluable in helping us improve our offerings. Thank you in advance!
Upcoming Events
Curiosity Café: Bi-weekly on Tuesdays, tickets below!
About: For those of you who haven’t had the opportunity to join our Curiosity Cafés and are wondering what they’re all about: Every two weeks, we invite members of our community (that includes you, dear reader!) to come out to the Madison Avenue Pub to engage in a collaborative exploration of our chosen topic. Through these events, we aim to build our community of people who like to think deeply about life’s big questions, and provide each other with some philosophical tools to dig deeper into whatever it is we are most curious about. After our scheduled programming, we encourage attendees to stay and mingle over food and drinks.
We will host our next Curiosity Café on Tuesday, September 10 from 6:00 - 8:30 pm at the Madison Avenue Pub (14 Madison Ave, Toronto, ON M5R 2S1). Please get a ticket using the button below the event description. If tickets are sold out, please contact us, either on Instagram @beingnbecomingorg or over email at info@beingnbecoming.org, and we will let you know if we can accommodate you.
The topic of our next café is: Empathy
Empathy can be a valuable tool for understanding others. But its value in decision-making tends to be a subject of heated debate. We speak of empathetic people as being considerate of others. We also tend to think of empathy as a motivator for making the right decisions. But while empathy has its merits, it may not always be the best guide for moral decision-making. After all, we tend to empathize more with those who are similar to us, those who look like us or share our backgrounds. Studies have also consistently shown that we have a strong “in-group” bias in that we tend to more strongly empathize with those we perceive as peers. The benefits of empathy can differ with respect to a person’s dispositions. For instance, Paul Bloom writes, “Empathy makes good people better, then, because kind people don’t like suffering, and empathy makes this suffering salient. If you made a sadist more empathic, it would just lead to a happier sadist.” We might disagree with this characterization, but nevertheless, it calls into question whether empathy is a reliable tool for moral decisions. Are there more effective ways to consider others’ perspectives? What are some other ways that people can be motivated to make the right decisions? Join guest moderator Leena Abdelrahim and our very own Marybel Menzies at the next Curiosity Café on September 10th, to unpack the benefits and drawbacks of empathy!
Both the “Pay-What-You-Can” and “free” tickets serve as a ticket to our café! We ask that you consider making a donation by purchasing a “Pay-What-You-Can” ticket to help us make our work and growth as an organization possible. If you have accessibility-related concerns, please visit our Eventbrite Page—in the event description you will find some accessibility-related information about the venue and the event.
Toronto Events
Chris’s Toronto Event Calendar
If you want more opportunities to connect, inquire and mingle with like-minded people, check out Chris’s calendar on Notion. Chris curates this calendar with events happening in Toronto. Events include thought-provoking lectures, group discussions, and workshops.
makeworld’s Calendar of Toronto Events
makeworld’s curated list of recurrent events in Toronto, which include tech meetups, lectures, unconventional comedy shows, and discussion-based events (like ours!).
Readings & Resources
Adrian’s Recommendations:
The Harm in Hate Speech by Jeremy Waldron. In this book, the legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron argues for the desirability of hate speech regulation on the grounds that hate speech undermines the dignity of vulnerable members of society. “A person’s dignity,” Waldron argues, “… is their social standing, the fundamentals of basic reputation that entitle them to be treated as equals in the ordinary operations of society. Their dignity is something they can rely on—in the best case implicitly and without fuss, as they live their lives, go about their business, and raise their families.” Tolerating hate speech, however, undercuts this basic assurance by telling its victims to just “live with it,” to resign themselves to an atmosphere where they are made to feel unwelcome, threatened, and less than equal. As someone who has spent the better part of his philosophical life in favour of expansive rights to free speech, I found Waldron’s case a valuable counterbalance.
“The Limits of Forgiveness” by Elizabeth Bruenig. The question of when we should or should not forgive is often linked to considerations of dignity—both the dignity of the wrongdoer and the dignity of the victim. Forgive too easily, one might argue, and you insult the dignity of the injured party; punish too harshly, and you violate the dignity of the injurer. In this talk (a transcript of which you can find here) Bruenig argues that forgiveness is key to promoting a society in which “we all have equal dignity and equal moral status.” Forgiveness, she contends, helps reverse the state of “moral exception” that wrongdoing creates, an asymmetrical relationship in which the victim is entitled to certain rights or privileges at the wrongdoer’s expense (such as the right to exact vengeance on, or punish, the wrongdoer). If this talk interests you, I’d also recommend Bruenig’s writing for The Atlantic.
“The Outer Limits of Liberalism” by David Brooks. In this essay, the columnist David Brooks examines the state of the MAID program in Canada, which at the time of writing was poised to legalize access to MAID for patients suffering solely from mental (rather than physical) illnesses. (That extension has now been deferred to 2027.) He argues that this—to him—worrying direction is the consequence of a good idea taken to its extreme: “autonomy-based liberalism,” which values individual freedom above all else, leads naturally to MAID, to the idea that the state should enable rather than restrain an individual’s right to a dignified death. Brooks then outlines an alternative version of liberalism—what he calls “gifts-based liberalism,” whereby “[t]he essential activity of life is not the pursuit of individual happiness. The essential activity of life is to realize the gifts I’ve been given by my ancestors, and to pass them along, suitably improved, to those who will come after.” Among the core tenets of gifts-based liberalism is the idea that we each have “infinite dignity, merely by being alive”; yet, Brooks argues, the excesses of the MAID program sanctioned by autonomy-based liberalism undermine this basic assumption by “suggest[ing] that some lives can be more readily extinguished than others—that some lives have more or less value than others.” I don’t know where the lines for MAID should be drawn; I find myself going back and forth on this question, and I can think of heartbreaking examples to support or challenge either side. But Brooks, and the thinkers he draws from, provide a valuable framework through which this issue and my liberal convictions themselves can be reexamined with fresh eyes.
Marybel’s Recommendation:
“Basic Income: The Price of Human Dignity” by Evelyn Forget. In this article, Forget details the lives of Jessie and Brenda, their struggles and the potential benefits of a Basic Income.
Jessie is a busy professional juggling work, kids, and personal commitments. Her income is insecure, as she works on a contract basis. Basic Income would provide her with financial stability during gaps between contracts.
Brenda lives in a small, unsafe room with limited resources. She relies on social services for basic needs. Basic Income would allow her to afford better housing and improve her quality of life.
The Ontario Basic Income experiment aimed to provide financial stability and dignity to individuals like Jessie and Brenda. Although it was cancelled, the program demonstrated that a Basic Income could help people break free from poverty and lead more stable lives. The cost of implementing such a program nationwide is feasible, considering the potential benefits and savings from reduced social assistance expenses. Forget argues that Basic Income should be seen as an investment in society, offering income security and redistributing time and resources to create a more equitable and humane society.
Featured Quote
True dignity abides with him alone Who, in the silent hour of inward thought, Can still suspect, and still revere himself, In lowliness of heart.
- William Wordsworth
Our mission is to present a diversity of perspectives and views. The views and opinions expressed in this newsletter are solely those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of Being and Becoming. Being and Becoming disclaims any responsibility for the content and opinions presented in the newsletter, as they are the exclusive responsibility of the respective authors. If you disagree with any of those presented herein, and you feel so inclined, we recommend reaching out to the original author and asking them how they came to hold that opinion. It’s a great conversation starter.
This case study was originally found in a paper by the legal philosopher H.L.A. Hart, “Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals.”