Misunderstanding 'Human Dignity'

Drawing on Elizabeth Anscombe, Ed Feser argues that modern day philosophers have come to misunderstand the idea of 'human dignity' at a very basic level.

The rhetoric of human dignity is commonplace today, both in secular liberal circles and in the Church. It is often treated as if it were moral common ground between them. As Alasdair MacIntyre has warned, this is an illusion, and such rhetoric is in fact problematic and even dangerous. For it is like an empty vessel into which very different contents can be poured, some salutary but others poisonous. Everything depends on how human dignity is defined and grounded, and when this is left vague, ideas that are at odds with traditional Christian thinking can be smuggled in under a Christian guise. I discussed some examples, and the Kantian roots of contemporary rhetoric about dignity, in an earlier Postliberal Order article.

In her neglected essay “The Dignity of the Human Being,” the eminent Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe provides a model for how this subject should be approached. She is rigorous where others are woolly, and orthodox where others are unsound. (The essay can be found in the collection Human Life, Action and Ethics: Essays by G. E. M. Anscombe.)

Rational animals

It is often said that all human beings are in equal possession of a special dignity that cannot be taken away from them. Anscombe agrees with this. But what does it mean, exactly? It cannot be a matter of being equal in goods such as wealth or voting rights, since these things obviously can in fact be taken away from people, and yet they remain human all the same. Nor is it any good to say that it has to do with everyone being equally human, because one could just as well say that all cats are equally cats. That hardly affords them any special dignity.

What human dignity does involve, Anscombe says, is our being “intellectual animals” and “having free will and [thus being] answerable for [our] actions.” That is to say, we have the power of reason, and can, accordingly, choose how we will act in light of what reason tells us. Nothing else in the physical world is like this, which is why our dignity is special. And unlike wealth and voting rights and the like, these powers cannot be taken away from us since they are partially constitutive of being human. That is what makes the dignity of all human beings equal.