Human Dignity and Human Rights
The concept of human dignity is often cited as the ultimate justification for human rights.


In fact, according to Louis Henkin,
Human rights discourse has rooted itself entirely in human dignity and finds its complete justification in that idea. The content of human rights is defined by what is required by human dignity—nothing less, perhaps nothing more.

Others who invoke this concept include G. Vlastos, J. Maritain, and J. Finnis. Orendnoted, “The fact that so many in the field subscribe to this view is evidence of a kind in favour of its persuasiveness.”

Orend, though, is also quick to critique this view, as are many others. He argues that one is left with rather circular reasoning when invoking “human dignity” as the justification for human rights.


He writes,
So the concept of human dignity refers to nothing outside of itself; here is where the chain of reasoning showing human rights justification must end.


Such a chain would run like this:
1. All human beings should be treated in accord with human dignity.
2. Human rights protect human dignity.
3. Therefore, all human beings should have their human rights respected.

Perhaps the greatest problems in using human dignity as a justification for human rights is that the concept of human dignity is encompasses to many aspects of life. It is also too vague and too difficult to define. Always being picked last when teams are chosen in school could be an affront to one’s dignity but could hardly be considered a violation of one’s human rights.

Additionally, one person’s view of human dignity may not be another person’s view of human dignity. A few brief examples shall be sufficient to highlight this point. The Muslim woman’s dress is a topic that is repeatedly attacked by human rights advocates, especially the more radical feminists among them. However, can it not be reasonably argued that to be accosted and presented with semi-nudity virtually everywhere—public parks, billboards, all forms of media—is an affront to human dignity?  Could one plausibly make such an argument?

There is no question that many Muslims throughout the world would agree with such an argument and one would expect or hope that many Christians, Jews and members of other faiths would also agree. At the same time, though, as stated above, human rights advocates demand such freedoms and defend them. In fact, many of them demand and defend even greater affronts to human dignity, such as pornography, sometimes even bordering on child pornography. 

How can such human rights proponents expect others to take them seriously when they claim that their entire theory is based on human dignity when they support such affronts to human dignity?


These difficulties concerning the concept of human dignity led Ignatieff to write,
I still have a difficulty about dignity. There are many forms and expressions of human dignity, and some of them strike me as profoundly inhumane. Rituals of sexual initiation, like genital cutting, for example, are linked to an idea of womanly dignity and worth. Likewise, ultra-Orthodox Judaism imposes a role on women that secular women find oppressive, but that religious women find both fulfilling and respectful of their dignity. So ideas of dignity that are supposed to unite different cultures in some shared attachment to human rights actually divide us. There is no easy way round the culturally specific and relative character of the idea of dignity.

In sum, what truly does respect for human dignity have to do with the permissibility of pornography, homosexuality, all sorts of forms of freedom of speech (including hate literature and attacks on religion, etc.) and the like? Can one truly make such a link? Again, one must emphasize that when one is speaking about human rights today, one is speaking exactly about these types of rights. It is exactly these kinds of detailed issues that cannot be vindicated by such broad justifications as “human dignity.”

Ignatieff, in the following passage, also argues that a foundation of this nature simply divides rather than unites the issue concerning justifying human rights.

It may be tempting to relate the idea of human rights to propositions like the following: that human beings have an innate or natural dignity, that they have a natural and intrinsic self-worth, that they are sacred. The problem with these propositions is that they are not clear and they are controversial. They are not clear because they confuse what we wish men and women to be with what we empirically know them to be. On occasion, men and women behave with inspiring dignity.

But that is not the same thing as saying that all human beings have an innate dignity or even a capacity to display it. Because these ideas about dignity, worth, and human sacredness appear to confuse what is with what ought to be, they are controversial, and because they are controversial, they are likely to fragment commitment to the practical responsibilities entailed by human rights instead of strengthening them. Moreover, they are controversial because each version of them must make metaphysical claims about human nature that are intrinsically contestable. Some people will have no difficulty thinking human beings are sacred, because they happen to believe in the existence of a God who created Mankind in His likeness. People who do not believe in God must either reject that human beings are sacred or believe they are sacred on the basis of a secular use of religious metaphor that a religious person will find unconvincing.

Foundational claims of this sort divide, and these divisions cannot be resolved in the way humans usually resolve their arguments, by means of discussion and compromise. Far better, I would argue, to forgo these kinds of foundational arguments altogether and seek to build support for human rights on the basis of what such rights actually do for human beings.

(In typical vein, Ignatieff finds no acceptable justification for the human rights paradigm and concludes that it is simply best to sidestep this issue, emphasizing what human rights supposedly does for human beings. )His passage highlights an interesting point: if a justification is contested, it will lead to division and must be rejected.  Since there are numerous people who believe in God and who believe that there overall beliefs about life have to be related to their belief in God, they will never be able to accept a justification for human rights that does not involve their perceptions about God and life. This means that without demanding them to give up such beliefs, it is impossible that there could ever be a unified agreement on the justification for human rights.

If there is no agreement on the justification for human rights, chances are that there is not going to be agreement about many other aspects of human rights, especially detailed laws and applications. This spells doom for the human rights paradigm as a whole. Other than agreement on some general principles, maybe not much more could be reasonably expected. This is exactly the struggle that is currently taking place in the world between human rights dogmatists and those who believe in other sources of law and culture.

Henkin actually accepts the fact that the religious understanding of human dignity is going to be very different from the secular one that he proposes.


He stated,
To be sure, religions also accept human dignity as a cardinal theme and motif. One finds hints of it in the principal Western religions. But the contours of the religious morality developed around this concept are not congruent with the implications of human dignity as commonly conceived in the domain of human rights.

Henkin then goes on to discuss many of the differences between the secular concept of human dignity and religious understandings of it. The differences, in many cases, are very true. In fact, he states, “Some years ago, I characterized religion as an alternative ideology, indeed, as a competing ideology, and a source of resistance to the ideas of human rights.”

His presentation is an argument against any claim that a universal human rights scheme can be rooted in the concept of “human dignity.” This demonstrates once again that a vague, undefined concept of “human dignity” cannot form the basis for human rights…