The Search for Human Dignity

“The reason there is such a thing as value in the world is that there are in the world beings who matter to themselves: who experience and pursue their own good. Were there no such beings, there would be no such thing as value. Were there no such beings, nothing would matter. But we are not the only such beings. We are the beings who create the order of moral values, the beings who choose to ratify and endorse the natural concern that all animals have for themselves. But what we ratify and endorse is a condition shared by the other animals. So we are not the only beings who matter. We are the only beings who on behalf of all animals can shake our fists at the uncaring universe, and declare that in spite of everything we matter.”

With these words, the brilliant Kantian moral philosopher Christine Korsgaard concluded the 2004 Tanner Lectures on Human Values. These words are beautiful, in that they conceive of life as meaningful and humanity as important. These words are inspiring, in that they call us to a greater appreciation for other creatures who share in one common life.

These words are also vacuous. 

I do not mean vacuous in the sense of mindless, or lacking intelligence (far from it), but in the archaic sense of empty or hollow. The noblest claims of this conclusion lack any substantive foundation.

Why in the world would we think that humans matter? The answer—if you read what is actually stated—is simply that we declare it to be so, or that there is no reason to explicitly state the reasons for declaring it to be so.

This seems to be the trend. Consider the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drawn up and ratified in the wake of World War II. Prefacing the work with a “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family,” the authors of this universal declaration lay down as the first article this sacrosanct conclusion: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”

But despite personally-held grounds for such a remark (by the Thomist contributor to the document, Jacques Maritain, for example), there is no asterisk, no footnote, no enumerated list of supporting arguments. It is so, some could be left to assume, because we declare it to be so.

The same is true with the EU Charter of Fundamental Human Rights, which makes as its first article “Human dignity is inviolable. It must be respected and protected.” We find the same problem in the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights, where, in article 5, the document claims “every individual shall have the right to the respect of the dignity inherent in a human being.” Draftees may have—indeed many did have—deeply held religious reasons for these claims. But consider what we are left with by lack of enumerated grounding reasons: just sentences.

Beautiful. 

Inspiring.

Vacuous. 

Apparently, one might assume, we humans declare ourselves to be special. In the case of these charters, we go one step further: we are superior, possessing an inherent dignity and a set of equal and inalienable rights simply because we belong to this special family called “human.” Jens Zimmerman, in his contribution to the “Very Short Introduction” series by Oxford University Press, tries to explain moral relativism this way: “your mother’s rule to keep your elbows off the table at dinner would carry the same moral weight as the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” Without any substantive foundation, it actually does.

It is with the greatest of ironies that Korsgaard elicits the response above precisely to undermine the declaratory judgment that humans are special in any moral sense. Consider this quote from the preface of Korsgaard’s more recent reflection:

“I want to start by questioning a view that I think that many people hold—the view that human beings are just more important than the other animals…I think that many people assume that animals are simply less important than people, and therefore that what happens to them matters less. That’s the view that I want to discuss. I think it is wrong. But the problem is not exactly that it is substantively false—that, by contrast, animals are just as important and valuable as people. The problem is rather that it makes (almost) no sense at all.”

Humans differ from other animals in certain important respects, to be sure. But when it comes to the moral community of equals who are ends-in-themselves, humans share specialness with all sentient beings. To claim otherwise and limit the moral community of equals to a smaller subset (say, all humans, for example), is not only arbitrary—“it makes (almost) no sense at all.”

Korsgaard arrives at this conclusion through a particular reading of Kant’s kingdom of ends. But the spadework for the larger claim was done by Peter Singer a half-century ago. In his seminal article of 1974, Singer noted that humans may be similar, but not equal. Equality is a moral ideal, not an actual fact. And most telling of all, there simply is no property or quality within the purview of contemporary science that provides any clear moral distinction separating all humans from all members of other species.

He's right. Compare humans with the great apes, for example. Consider biology, psychology, or sociology, and you will find no property or set of properties that lead to the conclusion that every human being is born equal, has inherent dignity, and possesses inalienable rights, simply as a result of being human. As such, there simply is no rational basis for granting exclusive “human” dignity.

Korsgaard is right, too. Following on the heels of these conclusions, she challenges the notion of any exclusively human claim on dignity or as members of the moral community of equals. The assumptions of western liberal democratic philosophy, coupled with the necessary implications of naturalism, simply will not yield any such notion.

So why do we persist in thinking so? The answer is that while most contemporary science and political philosophy works within the necessary implications of naturalism, western culture is still breathing off the fumes of our God-intoxicated past. The starting assumption that humanity is morally special is—and can only be—rooted in a conception of humanity as made in the image of God.

That significant point was not lost on the framers of the American Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” wrote the drafting committee, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Unlike every other declaration of equal human rights, this one provides a basis for thinking so. But more than that, they seemed to think they needed to.

In his book Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West, Andrew Wilson notes that the original draft of the Declaration held these truths to be “sacred and undeniable.” This would have been a better final version, notes Wilson, since these truths are by no means self-evident. But they are evident within a worldview that roots creation in the hands of a Creator who endowed humans with gifts in accord with sacred history.

A century before the American Declaration, and three centuries before Singer, the British Christian political philosopher John Locke anticipated the problem of positing human liberty, dignity, or equality without a basis in the nature of God and his relationship to humanity. Locke was a firm believer in equality, claiming there was “nothing more evident than that Creatures of the same species and rank…should also be equal one amongst another.” He applied this to humanity, claiming “all mankind” are “all equal and independent,” and therefore “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” But he admitted that species distinction does not necessarily give rise to a moral distinction, since a great ape who was able to reason to such a degree as to be “subject to law” would count as a “man.”

The problem is that it just isn’t clear where one could or should draw a line to create a moral community of equals; reason is a notoriously difficult one to fully define and apply, and it still remains a mystery why we intuitively think human beings who have diminished reasoning faculties should be protected among the moral community of equals.

For this reason, Locke lays down his explicit basis and boundary marker for inherent dignity, liberty, and equality: one’s relationship to the Creator. The reason “all mankind” is “all equal and independent,” is this: 

“for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker; all the servants of one sovereign Master, sent into the world by His order and about His business; they are His property, whose workmanship they are made to last during His, not one another’s pleasure.”

What Locke recognized, and the American Declaration promulgated—what is lacking in modern charters of human rights—is a moral ground for believing humans are special. Singer and Korsgaard are right to note that if you remove God from the picture the moral claim for specialness goes away.

But what do they offer in its place? Sentience. But why stop there? Why assume that to be a moral basis for drawing a circle among moral equals? Especially if we live in an “uncaring universe,” what would serve as the basis for a “moral community” in the first place? You guessed it—simply declaring it to be so.

Hidden in a footnote near the very beginning of her book Fellow Creatures, Korsgaard acknowledges she considered the role of God in the moral landscape, but then quickly reveals her all-too-common-failure to appreciate the Judeo-Christian claim about the relationship of God to humanity, and thus humanity’s relationship to the rest of creation:

Linda Zagzebski asked me if I thought it would make any difference if human beings were more important to God than the other animals are. This discussion is prompted by that question. But of course the ultimate conclusion I would draw from the discussions in the book is not that it does not matter if we were created by a god for some sort of purpose, but that no morally good God would create sentient beings just to be means to someone else’s ends.”

But what if all sentient beings—indeed, all things—were created for the ends of God? What if Locke’s approach is right, and all humans are “servants of one sovereign Master, sent into the world by His order and about His business…made to last during His, not one another’s pleasure”? The implications would not only suggest a rational basis for believing in human dignity and equality; it would suggest an obligation for humanity to treat all of creation with respect—including other sentient creatures. This, in fact, is the case C. S. Lewis offers. In The Problem of Pain, Lewis claims it is the Christian model of human uniqueness that leads to a sense of value and dignity for all creatures. He writes:

It may have been one of man’s functions to restore peace to the animal world…The theory I am suggesting…makes God the centre of the universe and man the subordinate centre of terrestrial nature: the beasts are…subordinate to man, and their destiny is through and related to his…the personality of the tame animals is largely the gift of man…their mere sentience is reborn to soulhood in us…

But remove the God hypothesis, and Singer and Korsgaard are right to expose the hollow foundations of human equality. As Michael Perry has noted,

The claim that every human being has inherent dignity and is inviolable is deeply problematic for many secular thinkers, because the claim is difficult—perhaps to the point of being impossible—to align with…secularism’s reigning intellectual convictions.

Yet Singer and Korsgaard’s measuring line of sentience exits by the same door. Let us declare, from our limited vantage point, which parts of creation matter, and declare it to be so—never stopping to ask why “matter” matters in the first place.

Thirty years ago, Louis Pojman asserted that all claims to human specialness such as inherent dignity are simply due to the fact that “we are living off the borrowed interest of a religious metaphysic.” But what if that religious metaphysic is more than interest…but the very principal?

To provide a different, less vacuous, proposal, allow me to rephrase Korsgaard:

The reason there is such a thing as value in the world is that there are in the world beings made in the image of God who matter to God: who experience and pursue the Good and are loved by the Good. Were there no such beings, there would be no image-bearers to reflect the value of the Good. We humans are uniquely the only such beings. We are the beings who reflect the created order of moral values and are the beings who choose to ratify and endorse the supernatural concern that all animals matter to God. What we ratify and endorse is the value of being made by God (which applies to all creation) and being called to serve as vice-regents over creation (something unique to humanity). So we are not the only beings who matter to God, to ourselves, or to each other. But we are, by design, the only beings who on behalf of all animals can bow before the caring sustainer of the universe and declare that in the light of everything, because of His love, all of life matters to God.