Human Dignity without Metaphysics? 

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. Just the same, the slaves in the Roman state have no sense of assigned value beyond their capacity for physical labor. Even the intelligentsia of the ancient world were not immune to this belief. Aristotle famously observed obvious differences in intelligence, virtue, and strength in individuals and concluded that some human beings were born inferior. They were, in his phrasing in Politics 1.5, “slaves by nature.” He is not alone in this assertion. Hippocrates, father of medicine, notes in Airs, Waters, Places the weakness of Asiatics, and Vitruvius, the Roman author, in De Architectura cites his belief in the slow-witted nature of “northern peoples.” Among the ancients, the Stoics stood out for various reasons. Chief among them was their argument that every human being shared in the logos, the rational principle that permeates the cosmos. 

Several Stoic doctrines found adoption by St. Paul, who baptized them into our familiar anthropology. Christianity picked up the image of the universal rationality of all mankind and radicalized the claim of the Stoics. Employing the directives of the Gospels, the poor, the disabled, the slave, and the emperor all possessed a naturally endowed worth. The person in the Christian worldview was beloved by an ever-present, ever-loving God and was the Imago Dei, a living icon of the supreme Deity.  

This proposition of human worth was not contingent on any notion of political or earthly achievement. The human person contained value beyond his obvious material utility. His dignity was inherent. While it is commonly overlooked, this anthropological doctrine proved historically revolutionary in the Roman world. Indeed, its growth in the cultural consciousness of the West helps define the end of the world of late antiquity and serves as the hallmark of a new Christian epoch in Western history.   

This proposition of universal human dignity supplied the moral foundations of Western civilization and of countless developments that the contemporary world takes for granted. The Imago Dei would serve as the basis for the condemnation of infanticide, common to the cultural spheres of Rome, Greece, and Carthage. Human dignity would see the formation of hospitals starting in the fourth century to care for the urban poor of the Eastern Empire. And, eventually, this would culminate in the birth of liberalism and the concept of universal human rights. 

Recognizing this tremendous moral and historical inheritance does not require any confessional state. Its value to our civilization has become axiomatic, far beyond any limitation of ecclesiastical creed. Even among those who are critical of Christian anthropology, such as the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, it was understood that contemporary humanitarianism was born of a Christian moral residue. Nietzsche’s attack on Christian morality is on this ground: that it presented moral equality for all mankind, denouncing the existence of alleged superiors. He pulled no punches when he wrote, in The Antichrist: “Christianity has waged a deadly war against this higher type of man; it has put all the deepest instincts of this type under its ban.” But Nietzsche prognosticated that Europe could not indefinitely retain Christian ethics while discarding its foundational Christian metaphysics. He suspected that sooner or later the bills would come due. 

Curiously, contemporary discussions about human dignity assume its place is self-evident, often proceeding as if the concept required no additional philosophical justification. Human dignity, and by extension, human rights, are taken as precepts that require no expansion. In the parlance of the American Declaration of Independence, they are “self-evident.” However, in being “self-evident” and self-evident alone, how they came to be imparted as such is forgotten. That is to say, human dignity is treated as an intuition rather than the conclusion of a complex moral anthropology. Continue with this same line of the Declaration, however: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” The full line of the text is a rebuke to such intuitive claims. Human dignity is self-evident to the extent that it is endowed by an agent outside of humanity itself. 

Now consider the challenge materialism poses to this claim. If human beings are exclusively highly developed, highly functional biological organisms produced by a blind evolutionary process, in what sense do they possess any intrinsic worth? Darwinian evolution has been a tremendous insight into the biological mechanisms that guide the course of our unfolding organic world. It can explain the internal psychology of why we value our offspring, cooperate within broader groups, or develop moral sentimentality. To some extent it can also explain why dignity is a useful, pro-social belief. However, it lacks the philosophical competence to readily explain why human dignity is objectively true, for dignity is a metaphysical and not a scientific proposition. A dogmatically materialist account of our human existence is fully capable of describing human behaviors, but less capable of grounding our human value. Nature, as we understand it, appears to be largely indifferent to the idea of dignity. The natural evils that punctuate our world—earthquakes, diseases, floods—exhibit no concern for human rights. The universe as described in the writings of contemporary naturalists contains many things of intellectual and social value, but at no point does inherent moral worth appear among them. This is because human value is beyond the limited purview of objective science, which concerns itself with observed facts and data. Human dignity cannot be proved using the ordinary instrumentation of science. 

In our day, some theorists and philosophers have attempted to solve this problem by locating our dignity in our autonomous capacity as individuals: human beings possess worth because they can actively make choices and are independent agents operating in a wider world. While the conclusion is true, it is, the logic is a non sequitur. Why should our autonomy itself possess any moral significance, and nevertheless imply an innate dignity? Why is the ability to choose inherently valuable rather than just reasonably useful?  

Others have also attempted to locate dignity in various abstract ways, through consciousness, rationality, or self-awareness. While these proposals are certainly related to the rightful dignity of the human person, they encounter separate difficulties of their own. If dignity depends on cognitive capacities, then human worth appears to exist on a spectrum of cognitive value. Intellectuals, and even adults, would possess more dignity than a child; the healthy adult would be worth more than the patient suffering in the late stages of severe dementia. Such myopic conclusions can hardly be embraced, yet they seem difficult to avoid once dignity is tied to something prosaic, like the idea of functional abilities. 

The weakness of these philosophical alternatives is why contemporary discourse has little foundation and frequently borrows moral assumptions from traditions that it no longer fully accepts. Perhaps this is the acid test for all of postmodernity: to keep the law and jettison the lawgiver. We continue to insist that every human being possesses equal worth, even as we grow increasingly uncertain about the moral basis of that conviction. 

This dilemma is not confined to the courts and universities alone. It is endemic in the fabric of our civilization and all its related institutions. Moral questions concerning the purpose and utility of euthanasia, abortion, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering all presuppose that we have some operational definition of what a human being is. As a general rule for any kind of endeavor, before we can determine what ought to be done, it is necessary that we first determine what kind of creature is being acted upon. That is to say, “what is man”? 

For this reason, metaphysics has a habit of returning precisely when intellectuals believe they have escaped it. It is possible to reject traditional imaginings relating to the absolute state of human nature. However, it is impossible to avoid adopting some alternative philosophical thesis. There is no appeal to an empirical certainty. Science is eloquent on this subject. The question was never whether we should employ metaphysics; the question is whether we should acknowledge that we employ it. The twentieth century has offered a sobering lesson on this point in particular. Totalitarian regimes frequently denied universal accounts of human value and replaced them with utilitarian ones. Individuals are reduced to a certain racial, economic, or ideological criterion. The value of human beings is limited to their utility as instruments of alleged historical progress. Among such states, it has been observed that once dignity ceased to be intrinsic, it became conditional, and what is conditional can always be revoked. 

This does not prove that every secular worldview leads down a short road to tyranny. But it does suggest that societies require more than moral platitudes to maintain themselves and their selection of virtues. They require reasons for their lvirtues. We collectively might hold something up as good, but if there is no rationale to support that belief, it will eventually dissolve in the same way that all moral fashions pass away.  

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. 

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