By D P Curtin, Public Discourse.
A culture that continually invokes dignity while refusing to discuss its foundations may discover that the concept gradually loses its internal coherence. If man possesses a unique and inviolable worth, then reality itself must contain some explanation for that fact.
In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, built on the premise of protecting human dignity in the newly molded postwar world. Modern people speak incessantly about human dignity. Politicians invoke it, judges appeal to it, universities celebrate it, and international organizations enshrine it in declarations and charters. The phrase appears so frequently that it has acquired the status of a moral axiom. But a curious question lurks beneath this near-universal consensus: What exactly is human dignity, and why do human beings possess it?
The modern world is confident in its conclusions and remarkably hesitant about its premises. This kind of hesitation would have puzzled earlier generations. For much of Western history, human dignity was not regarded as self-evident. Its standing has only developed in our civilization, and only more recently in the structure of our law. Its admission as a precept of our civilization was understood as a consequence of a larger metaphysical vision. Human beings possessed dignity because they participated in a reality that ultimately transcended them. Whether articulated through Greek philosophy, Christian theology, or natural law, dignity was rooted in an account of what man is. Strangely, in our own age, many intellectuals wish to retain the idea of human dignity while abandoning the moral and metaphysical foundations that once buttressed it. This results in something akin to a curious attempt to preserve the fruit long after the tree has been cut down.
The classical world has no notion of equality, either legal or moral. The senatorial class of ancient Rome is afforded a kind of dignity, but it is not synonymous with any innate dignity intrinsic to the person; it is a dignity ascribed to class.