Dignity definition displayed on page of a dictionary. Photo by cgarniersimon via Pixabay.
Subramaniam Vincent is director of journalism and media ethics at the Markkula Center of Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Views are his own.
Human dignity is taken to mean the inherent and equal worth of all humans in a moral-political sense. In its page chronicling the history and origin stories of dignity’s meanings, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy throws light on the importance of the word. Dignity is “neither dependent on one’s being of use or interest to others nor based on one’s merits” and it “grounds basic rights…or the authority to make claims and demands of others.”
While it may be fashionable to say that dignity as a word is the grounding moral force for human rights, the reality is far more complicated. Philosophers and theory apart, when people and leaders in everyday life are fighting manifest indignities, how do they frame the word and meaning into their articulations, arguments, mission, organizing, solidarity-building, and storytelling? Framing is a powerful communication tool that opens up or shuts down pathways in the mind for thinking, by making some things salient and other things less.
How dignity is framed (or absent) in public conversations or debates, especially about the harm or opportunities from laws and policies is not as widely discussed as the issues themselves.
When human rights are under attack, do vulnerable communities go back upstream and build afresh in defense of dignity? Another aspect is the fragility of dignity itself, especially online where speech can exclude, subordinate, and dismiss the claims of people who don’t seek favor with corrupt power.
The normative power of dignity’s meaning has had substantive implications for norms downstream, in real-world industry spheres where professional organizations develop codes of ethics by consensus. In journalism ethics, for instance, the dignity of sources matter, which helps develop guidance to push back against old-world transactional “means to an end” treatments that traditional reporters have given to vulnerable communities as sources.
And there is the question of dignity and democracy itself. In non-democracies for instance, judicial proceedings do afford the most minimal of privileges for a defendant to make claims or counterclaims on the issue they are charged with. This follows from one meaning of human dignity: a person ought to be able to make claims and demands of others. In liberal democracies, it could easily be said that human dignity should be assured for everyone.
In reality, as noted earlier, battles are fought in democracies everyday for people to just be treated equally. If you look around, the dignity of fellow humans is under attack everywhere: online hate and exclusion, the pain of living unhoused, racial justice, prison reform, living as LGTBQ+ people, immigration, etc. We know this because a free press in democracies is expected to bring those stories to light.
And yet, when it comes to framing as a tool of efficacy in communication, how and when human dignity is invoked does appear to be different strokes for different folks. And the question for ethics is also how should it be? Should activists, changemakers, leaders, and muckrakers bring up dignity as a basic norm, or as the moral basis for grounding rights and claims, or to defend autonomy, or all of those things? What are the difficulties people are going to have with this approach? Or should we drop the word altogether, and focus on the material harms and benefits from policies and laws to communities? How does this play out in everyday life, both online and offline?
Each one of us reading this may not all have the same answers to above questions. It may even seem that in the current political moment, everything is fraught and temptation to yield to nihilism is nigh. But it is at this moment that we need a sense of renewal in our democratic culture. One root for this renewal can be to reassert the moral-political meaning of dignity - equal worth of all humans - in as many ways and from as many struggles and lived experiences as possible. We need a new focus on dignity as a lens into a conflicted world, especially for peoples and communities who are being robbed of it every day and week. We must bring their voices and agency back into focus.
To discuss the power of human dignity in meaning and framing, we will hold a panel session with grassroots Bay Area leaders on human dignity and framing, on May 2nd, Digital Dignity Day, at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.
