is inalienable, indefeasible, and inviolable; though it is undeserved, it is nonetheless worthy of respect and, in a certain way, places the rest of humanity in a position of owing.
It is unique, universal, anonymous, and abstract. And, consequently, it is also cosmopolitan; in other words, it is the same for all human beings on the planet.
An idea such as this, in spite of appearing to be a truism, is neither “natural” nor “normal,” which is demonstrated by the fact that no one seems to have missed it in the course of previous millennia. It has to be understood rather as if it were an exceedingly difficult lesson to be learned collectively, a lesson that is not written in a revealed book or in the book of nature. It is, as it were, a moral truth that has recently established itself with the majority as a result of recent historic events of unspeakable inhumanity, which have created a consensus, in negative terms, that such events should never, under any circumstances, be repeated.
Something that is evident is perceived, as such, by those whose senses are trained to perceive it – which is what happens in the perception of artistic perfection or philosophical or scientific truth. Therefore, the reason for people’s dignity depends on their education. Kant’s distinction between dignity and price is again useful to encapsulate the multiple objectives of education into two: training professionals and training citizens.
A professional is a person who has learned the rules of a trade and applies them with competence in order to make a living by supplying a product or a service for which the market is prepared to pay a price. A country with competent professionals has the stamp of a truly modern country. Together, with the training of professionals, the second objective is to educate that same individual to become a citizen, which means someone who is aware of their dignity. A rounded education not only becomes the source of practical and profitable skills but also prompts the citizen to be aware of their own dignity and instills self-respect into themselves, to avoid what Kant describes as “to find himself, on self-examination, worthless and contemptible in his own eyes” (Kant 1898, p. 259).
The ancients, at the times when they were not engaged in negotium, recommended the cultivation of otium cum dignitate, a complacency in that intimate feeling about the value of each individual, subject neither to price nor the rationality of the marketplace. Price and dignity are not locked in irreconcilable antagonism, but there is certainly a tension between them, which has no definitive solution. And, if there is a conflict, dignity prevails, because, both in chronologic and anthropologic terms, we are citizens first and professionals second.
Inviolable but Violated a Thousand Times
A common criticism leveled at dignity and repeated by its adversaries is that it cannot be objectively and rationally explained and that it is, therefore, indemonstrable.
There is no doubt that dignity is the postulate of a value, not an empirical fact observable by the senses. It does not resemble, for example, an identifiable object, or a logical deduction, or a juridical law. Its essence is of the moral realities, like bravery, decency, compassion, which are not apprehended by scientific reasoning but which are recognized by feelings, even before they can be defined. Whatever dignity may be is learnt, not in the logical definition of scholarly treatises, but in the direct intuition of its essence, which is revealed by a specific example.
The law requires that something should be done and, if it is not obeyed, the law imposes it coactively. But in the realm of morality, unlike that of legality, it would be futile to order someone to be virtuous: you cannot tell people to be good; you invite them to be good. Every example of virtue includes an invitation to do the same and to make it generalized. And naturally this is also true of the practical acts of dignity. But it is not true of that innate and original dignity that every human being possesses by the mere fact of being. One thing is what a person does, which can be worthy or unworthy (pragmatism) and another is what he or she is (ontology). And, as I have said before, the democratic concept of original, ontological dignity remains intact in spite of reiterated unworthy praxis. This dignity is not a fact, not even a moral fact, but a postulate, an attribution that, with the passage of time, has widened its subjective basis. This growth does not come about through an invitation, as in the case of virtue, but through scandal.
The witness of an action, which had been morally invisible in the past, surprises himself on contemplating with sorrow what he suddenly perceives to be an act of violation. At that moment, the witness has implicitly applied to the victim, and the group to whom the victim belongs, a dignity that tradition had obstinately refused to afford him. Novels in the nineteenth century, for example, familiarized readers of the time with the injustices suffered by abused women, abandoned children, impoverished masses, debtor prisoners, and exploited workers. These novels showed readers, for the first time, that sectors of the population who historically suffered discrimination possessed the same dignity as the privileged by highlighting the scandal produced by such wretched situations. In the majority of cases, dignity is recognized by its absence, when the respect due is missing, because it is then that unquestionable truths are clearly evident. And the feeling of scandal is not usually limited to benevolent compassion but sooner or later unleashes an active movement of social reform aimed at bringing to an end those situations of indignity that are now judged to be intolerable.
Egalitarian dignity has been ranked as sacrosanct, and yet it is no secret that, in fact, it continues to be violated a thousand times a day. However, there is an important difference between the violations of the past and those of today: the dignity of women, children, workers, or the poor may continue to be violated, but today no one can do so without degrading themselves. For centuries, a woman’s body, for example, could be constantly violated without punishment and even without reproach, because that action, given one name or another, or none, had become invisible in the normalcy of total masculine domination. Today, many women continue, unfortunately, to suffer violations, but now the violator can only carry out his repugnant act by degrading himself morally while creating revulsion around him and in himself too, if he is not totally corrupted.
The revulsion produced by indignity shows humanity the path towards moral progress.
A Conclusion and a Proposal: Cosmopolitan Dignity
Of all the human groups who have persistently suffered discrimination since the earliest times, one of the most affected has been foreigners. Over the centuries, law and civilization have made great strides of progress for those living within their own frontiers; but very often, those who were born outside those frontiers were, all too often, considered barbarians or savages and received the treatment accorded to slaves, an intermediate status between that of a human being and an animal. In this respect too, perspectives have evolved drastically in our time. Over the past few years, many voices have been raised to condemn the restrictive policies that Western governments have applied to migrants from other parts of the planet, who flee from war or poverty. They are indignant at the closure of frontiers or the expulsion of migrants, which they consider to be contrary to elementary humanitarian principles. The fact that their condemnation and anger are, in many cases, fully justified should not prevent us from seeing the unusual novelty that one and the other imply in strictly comparative terms: they both presuppose the tacit recognition, unprecedented in history, of the full dignity of all men and women without distinction as human beings, irrespective of whether they were born on one side of the border or the other.
The Spanish poet Antonio Machado formulates the original intuition with admirable precision when his character Juan de Mairena says: “No one is more than anyone else” (Machado 1986), which is same as saying that “however much a man is worth, there is nothing greater than his worth as a man.” The statement that “however much a man or a woman is worth, he or she has no greater worth than that of being a man or a woman” is the basis for the categorical statement I made earlier, that dignity is “unique, universal, anonymous, and abstract.”
