Death of Dignity

The notion that human beings have rights is often said to follow from the belief that human beings have dignity, but in our secular age the concept of human dignity has come in for increasing criticism. The problem is that there is only one reason to think that there's anything about us that gives us inherent value and that's that we believe ourselves to be created by God in His image and that He loves us.

Take God away, however, and the entire superstructure of human worth, dignity, and rights built upon Him collapses. This is what we see happening in Western society today and ironically enough it's people who would otherwise call themselves "humanists" who are promoting the collapse. Mary Ann Glendon has a fine piece on this in the current issue of First Things in which she offers a quick history of how Western intellectuals have gone from enthusiasm for the concept of dignity to antipathy toward it. Here are some highlights:

As the bioethicist Adam Schulman poses the question: “Is dignity a useful concept, or is it a mere slogan that camouflages unconvincing arguments and unarticulated biases?” The question has implications far beyond the field of bioethics. Indeed, it has haunted the entire modern human rights project ever since the drafters of the UN Charter chose to begin that historic document with a profession of the member nations’ “faith” in “freedom and human rights” and in “the dignity and worth of the human person.”

Today, controversies about the meaning and value of the concept are more intense than ever, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to evade the question of whether “dignity” can support the enormous weight it has been asked to carry in moral and political discourse.

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once wrote “I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand.”

Some attempts to provide a moral basis for the concept of the dignity of human life proceed in Kantian fashion from the premise that human beings have dignity because they are autonomous beings capable of making rational choices, while others, following Rousseau, base the concept on the sense of empathy that most human beings feel for other sentient creatures. But the former understanding has ominous implications for persons of diminished capacity, while the latter places all morality on the fragile basis of a transient feeling. Christian and Jewish believers commonly say that the dignity of human life is grounded in the fact that human beings are made in the image and likeness of God. But that proposition is hardly likely to convince a nonbeliever.

People can't be told over and over that they're just material beings, a collocation of atomic particles with no soul or any essential property that distinguishes them significantly from a baboon, without them soon beginning act as if they were baboons.

Men can't be told over and over that human beings have no fundamental worth, no value, nothing upon which to base human rights before those who have power begin to act consistently with that belief.

The secular, materialist view of man invariably, under the guise of exalting humanity, winds up dehumanizing him. Every state in the 20th century which was built upon materialist assumptions of humanity created holocausts of one sort or another as soon as their leaders had the power to do so. The irony of secular humanism is that by banishing God it seeks to deify man, but throughout the world it has consistently had the effect of reducing man to the status of a brute.

Check out Glendon's piece at the link.