must have been implicit to human rights all along. That cannot be correct. During most of that time dignity served to elevate some people over others, rather than putting them on the same level.3 And when dignity did finally enter politics—mysteriously encoded at mid-century in the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), and West German constitutional Basic Law (1949)—it was not the watchword in philosophy or political theory that it has become. Which leads to a question: what is in the water—other than fewer whales than in Melville’s day?
Before the modern era, dignity was not considered to be an inviolable value. The Renaissance guru Pico della Mirandola, who wrote an oration in the fifteenth century later called “On the Dignity of Man,” is often regarded as a confused precursor of later understandings of it. (In Dignity: Its History and Meaning, Harvard political theorist Michael Rosen treats Pico this way.4) But Pico, a Cabbalist and magician, was too idiosyncratic a thinker to be anyone’s ancestor.5 After all, he insisted that what makes humans different than everything else in the universe is their lack of any defined essence. As contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has noted, Pico’s discourse “does not contain the term dignitas, which … could not in any case refer to man. For the central thesis of the oration is that man, having been molded when the models of creation were all used up, can have neither archetype nor proper place nor specific rank.”6
In modern times, Alexis de Tocqueville was the first to write about the democratization of high standing. A French aristocrat who travelled to America to size up a newfangled thing called “democracy,” Tocqueville warned that if aristocratic values were not somehow preserved after the departure of feudal kings and nobles, humanity would be debased. “In aristocratic ages vast ideas are commonly entertained of the dignity, the power, and the greatness of man,” he noted.7 Democracy might promise leveling up but mainly threatened to flatten distinctions altogether—a risk which neither Waldron nor other current chroniclers of dignity seem to take seriously. But even on its own terms, there are problems with Waldron’s argument.
Aristocratic social status is not an innate characteristic: ask the riff-raff who have bought or married into it over the centuries. And even for those who lucked into high birth, their standing was always ritually established, as the ceremonial anointing of kings suggests. For nobles, social requirements included dress, language, manners and manor, and for males also involved the sort of repetitious violence and denigration of the body that we now think human dignity is supposed to deter or forbid. Nineteenth-century aristocrats, in their last gasp of importance, whiled away their idle hours rattling sabers, and when not preparing to fight were engaged in nasty duels, giving one another the physical scars that were frequently the mandatory signs of their superiority.8 Such rituals, like anointing, seem fairly silly when applied to everyone; besides, discussions about human dignity consider it to be “inherent.” It is not something that elaborate social rituals, and least of all bodily violence, are required to establish.
The historical origins of dignity in social status are important to Waldron because of the recent popularity of the turn to another potential source—abstract philosophy—for securing human worth. Even as dignity was slowly being recognized as existing beyond aristocrats, philosophers continued their age-old struggle to identify some uniquely human properties that set us above the other animals. One philosopher, however, the sage of the German Enlightenment Immanuel Kant, thought about human distinction precisely in terms of dignity—namely, the priceless worth conferred on us by our freedom to choose.9 Kant inserted a break in the great chain of being between the rest of the animals, which are purely subject to the determination of nature’s laws, and human beings, who could (he hoped) deploy their free will to make their own rules rather than slavishly obey beastly imperatives. In a difficult argument, Kant insisted that man’s “rational nature,” our ability to set ends, makes everyone of highest value, and indeed provides the basis of all value in the world. His metaphysical promotion of the centrality of human dignity is significant intellectually because, as Rosen remarks, it is on Kant’s “giant shoulders the modern theory of human rights rests” nowadays.10
Waldron, whose latest book is typically careful, lucid, and subtle, seems openly nervous about resting everything on those shoulders. In practical terms, he suggests that it is best to establish people’s worth in the future not by abstract and controversial claims like Kant’s about their freedom and autonomy, which do not command universal agreement, but rather by letting the law work slowly to grant them higher status, as has been the case in constitutional and international human rights law during the last few decades. Further, as Waldron persuasively argues, it’s not possible to derive from Kant’s idea of human dignity all that human rights law might protect. For example, the Universal Declaration makes room for economic and social protections, but how can the notion of human dignity justify the declaration’s more specific protection of unionization rights or paid vacations?
The partisans of a metaphysical basis for human dignity might respond, predictably, that what goes up can go down. And ultimately some knockdown argument is required to establish the grounds for treating human beings as inherently precious. Social status is a powerful source of norms, but it is no necessary basis for improving treatment. The arc of the moral universe is definitely long, as our president likes to say, but it does not bend towards justice unless pushed. Waldron’s proposal is that the universal and egalitarian implications of Kant’s kingdom of ends can be reached indirectly by allowing the democratization of high status to continue through various legal institutions. But it is hard to see why anyone could be confident about this bet—unless Waldron were, like Tocqueville (or Barack Obama), committed to the view that history inevitably betters humanity’s lot. But at this late date it is naïve to appeal to the workings of providence. In fact, a closer look at the historical details of dignity’s trajectory suggests that its prominence today is directly related to a crisis of progress.
There is a big omission in the view that dignity is the rank due to high social status: the lord at the top of the totem pole, God. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael allows that dignity still exists in the natural kingdom, where divine majesty remains intact even if America has shown the world that men can rule themselves. “In the great Sperm Whale, this high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely amplified,” he remarks, “that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature.”11 This is the sort of dignity that matters to Captain Ahab, famously obsessed with the Deity who refuses to answer him—and for whom the white whale stands in as proxy.
Unlike Ishmael, Ahab fears the loss of dignity resulting from the departure or silence of God. He fears that when belief in a God on high wanes, humanity’s worth and purpose is thrown radically into doubt. As the literary critic Robert Milder argues in his magnificent study of Melville, Exiled Royalties, “Ahab craves recognition that he is heaven-born and, if not heaven-destined, then at least, by nature and bearing, heaven-worthy … If God will not condescend to him by word or sign, Ahab will extort the sign, if only by forcing God to kill him.”12 By extension, Moby-Dick explores how human dignity ultimately depends on (and comes from) a theological principle, not a political or social one alone.
Kings and aristocrats relied heavily on a theological worldview, with God establishing their “divine right” for the rule of his noble representatives on earth. In fact, it is extremely doubtful that Kant’s bundle of assumptions about what makes human beings dignified can be plausibly traced to European beliefs about social status, as opposed to theological premises which he struggled to reformulate in secular terms. As the nineteenth century passed, and Kant’s thought fell out of favor (Arthur Schopenhauer called dignity “the shibboleth of all empty-headed moralists”), the party most closely associated with claims about human dignity was neither liberal nor socialist but conservative and rigid in its commitment to hierarchy: the Catholic Church.
In his penetrating and sprightly essay on human dignity, Rosen rightly emphasizes the centrality of Catholicism to the modern history
