Human Dignity

The ideas of human dignity and equality are central to much moral and political philosophy especially since the 18th century Enlightenment, but the roots of them can be traced to Jewish and Christian beliefs about the special status of human beings as images of God (imagines Dei). One of the most famous pronouncements of equality is in the US Declaration of Independence (1776) "We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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” which appears to quote in part from Milton who in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) connects equality with the Imago Deo doctrine "No man who knows ought, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were borne free, being the image and resemblance of God himself”. There is, therefore, a seeming irony in the fact that affirmations of human dignity and equality have become more common and more stridently affirmed at the same time as religious belief has declined. The problem for a secular account is to specify what dignity is and what is the relevant respect in which all possess dignity and equality and then find a justification for the idea that these holds universally. It is often said that all are morally equal, but this does not mean that all are equally morally good or even equally capable of being morally good. Rather, it seems too mean that all have intrinsic equal worth or are equally morally considerable, i.e. no-one is more valuable or matters more morally than anyone else. Finding a basis for this is challenging as all physical or mental human properties are possessed in varying degrees. Efforts to ground dignity and moral equality not in empirical facts but in notions of transcendent nature and idealised rationality then begin to look like the religious notions they were intended to replace. For the reason the secular philosopher Richard Rorty proposed that instead of regarding dignity and equality as fact they should instead be treated as a policy, i.e. even if people aren’t equal we should treat them as if they were. But that raises the question why?