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Mainstream writers on development have recently begun to explore the importance of dignity in the design and delivery of aid. Preferences of recipients are regularly ignored and subjugated to the preferences of donors, which are often influenced by rent-seeking special interests, and the poor are regularly portrayed as objects of pity in âpoverty porn,â rather than as persons deserving of respect.1 There is a growing awakening that the donor/recipient relationship can undermine one of the most important elements of human well-being: oneâs dignity. In March 2019, researchers at the Overseas Development Institute published the results of a simple exercise. They asked refugees who were receiving aid what dignity meant to them. They concluded that the meaning of dignity is both context and culturally specific, but that two concepts of dignity stood out: dignity as respect and dignity as self-reliance.2 They quote one refugee as saying, âWorking hard and earning your own livelihood is a big part of Rohingya identity and our idea of dignity.â3 Those types of explorations should prompt a widening of the focus to encompass not only the design and delivery of aid to those in need, but to address the centrality of dignity, not only to aid, but to development, which is not something that can be delivered to people, but is an achievement.
What is dignity? People contest the meaning and the proper uses of vitally important concepts all the time. We can ask, What is dignity?, as well as What is equality?, What is justice?, What is liberty?, What is fairness? Many central concepts in moral and political discourse are âessentially contested,â meaning that although people deploy them, they contest their meaning as they do so.4 Asking âWhat is equality?â may yield very different answers, even among those who profess to be in favor of equality. We can distinguish between a concept, such as âequality,â and its competing conceptions, such as that âeveryone should be equal before the lawâ or that âeveryone should always have the same amount of wealth.â5
Concepts can also evolve, which makes the task of extracting the meaning from usage a challenge, because the use of the concept may have changed over time, as the concept was applied to new situations or contexts. A particularly interesting and relevant case in point is the concept of âfree manâ in Englandâs Magna Carta of 1215, the famous contract in which the King âgranted, for us and our heirs for ever, all the liberties written out below, to have and to keep for them and their heirs, of us and our heirs,â and that among those liberties was that
So, who was a âfreemanâ? Every human being? All adult males? All adult landowners? As one scholar noted, the rights of a freeman, as well as the definition of a freeman, were broadened over time. âThe rights declared in 1215/1225 applied to considerably fewer than ten percent of the inhabitants in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.â7 Those rights and that appellation were later applied in the seventeenth century to all English subjects and later to subjects in the colonies. The history of liberty has been, to a large extent, the history of the extension of the concept of liberty to more and more categories of people, until it embraces all of humanity.
âDignityâ also has a history. In the Roman world, both the term and the concept were once applied to the wealthy and the powerfulâsenators, equestrians, consuls, emperors, the res publica itself. Now the concept applies to a poor and humble Moroccan vegetable merchant in the twenty-first century. The English dignity is derived from the Latin dignitas, and, like liberty, its scope has expanded and, with it, its content, for the original meaning was connected to class and social standing, whereas the modern derivativeâdignity, as well as the equivalent or similar terms in many other languagesâhas come to be globally embraced, across cultures and countries, and applied to all.
In hierarchical societies the dignity of some excludes that of others. The term corresponds to ârank.â In the modern world, when it comes to dignity, the have-nots want, not to dispossess what the haves enjoy, but to enjoy it in equal measure. Modern dignity is achieved not by clambering over others but by achieving and enjoying equality. As the modern figure, an inspiration to reformers of later centuries, Richard Rumbold, said in his last speech before he was brutally executed, âI am sure there was no man born marked of God above another, for none comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him.â8
Everywhere that people are seized or imprisoned, or stripped of their rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of their standing in any way, or proceeded against with force, all without the lawful judgment of their equals or by the law of the land, they yearn for dignity, and with it equal liberty and equality before the law. The modern forms of the indignity to which billions of people are subjected today include many that would have been familiar to the people of England in the time of King John: being forced to beg for permission to start a business, to transfer property rights, to make contracts on mutually agreeable terms, to trade across borders, andâto add insult to injuryâhaving to wait for days, months, or years for permissions that can be refused on a whim (or without the payment of a bribe); being subjected to arbitrary power and even brutal violence; being dispossessed and lacking access to the law, which is reserved only for the rich, the powerful, and the connected.
A brief examination of the historical trajectory of the concept of dignity may help us to see how a concept that originated in a particular context, denoting the high statuses (dignity and rank often being used interchangeably) of certain persons, has come to have universal application, having been separated from rank and privilege.
Ciceroâs legacy
One of the most important texts in the history of moral and political thinking was written by the Roman orator, lawyer, and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero. In the last year of his life, in the form of a letter to his son, Cicero laid out his mature thoughts on social and political life and on the duties of life, âFor no part of life ⌠can be free from duty. Everything that is honourable in a life depends upon its cultivation, and everything dishonourable upon its neglect.â9 Ciceroâs treatment of dignitas and its related idea of decorum (or seemliness) played a significant role in articulating and promulgating the conception of dignity that we will apply throughout this work.
Although dignitas is a term of comparison, Cicero transferred the focus from the comparison of the statuses of groups of persons (or of the state) compared to other persons or states and put it on the comparison of humans to non-rational beings. The dignity of a human being was rooted in rationality, albeit understood differently than it was understood by Immanuel Kant 1,803 years later. While applying the concept of dignity to all human beings, Cicero simultaneously recognized the numerical and material individuation that makes each of us unique. Ciceroâs reconceptualization of dignitas has echoed down the ages louder than its earlier and more restrictive meaning because of both Ciceroâs intellectual and persuasive powers and the outsized influence of his writings, which were copied by hand and which transmitted his ideas from the Classical World through the Dark and the Middle Ages to our own.10
Ciceroâs formulation has three key elements:
- Dignity is universal because all humans share a common nature. (
One must understand that we have been dressed, as it were, by nature for two roles: one is common, arising from the fact we all have a share in reason and in the superiority by which we surpass the brute creatures.
11) - Dignity is individualized by the fact that we each possess âour own nature.â (âThe other, however, is that assigned specifically to individuals. For just as there are enormous bodily differences ⌠similarly, there are still greater differences in menâs spirits.â âWe must act in such a way that we attempt nothing contrary to universal nature; but while conserving that, let us follow our own nature.â12)
- Dignity is inherent to our common nature, but it also sets standards and goals for us. It requires effort to live a dignified life and we can fail to live up to our dignity by not acting in accordance with our two natures, our universal (human) nature and our individual nature. (
If we wish to reflect on the excellence and worthiness [dignitas] of our nature, we shall realize how dishonourable it is to sink into luxury and to live a soft and effeminate lifestyle, but how honourable it is to live thriftily, strictly, with self-restraint and soberly.
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Ciceroâs re-formulation of the concept of dignity brings with it a requirement of effort, of striving; we must act, in some ways and not in others, to qualify as dignified, as maintaining our dignity. That is also a necessary ingredient in the citizenship foundational to democracy and in the work and entrepreneurship and future orientation foundational to development.
Cicero also laid a foundation for human rights that was widely cited in succeeding ages and played a substantial role in the formulation of modern doctrines of human rights:
Much more can be said about the philosophical formulations of the modern conception of dignity, as well as the social and economic influences, but a few more centrally important thinkers are important to the story.
For the highly influential philosopher Thomas Aquinas, personhood per se is both individuated (in contrast to the idea of collective or organic persons) and associated with âhigh dignityâ: âBy some the definition of person is given as hypostasis distinct by reason of dignity. And because subsistence in a rational nature is of high dignity, therefore every individual of the rational nature is called a person.â15 Like Cicero, Thomas Aquinas not only focused on the rational nature and on the capacity for choice of rational beings, but on the fact that personhoodâand hence dignityâattaches to individuals:
The dignity that has transformed the modern world is not the haughty dignity of the Roman senator or man-at-arms, but the equal dignity that characterizes each individual and which validates self-control and respect of the rights of others, enterprise, innovation, and value creation. Indeed, as the early modern writer Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, put it in his famously influential Oration on the Dignity of Man, each individual is a choosing being, capable of choosing a lifeâs path, for âwe have been born into the condition of being what we choose to be.â17 A few saw that possibility, howe...
