scholars have pointed out a conceptual dilemma here: if dignity is intrinsic, it should not need protection through laws and policies.10 Yet violations of human rights, such as torture, clearly constitute affronts to dignity, and the purpose of reflecting human rights in law both at the national and international levels is to protect people’s dignity. Despite this theoretical dilemma, I believe that, on a commonsense level, the notion that every human being possesses an intrinsic worth and that this worth should be recognized by other human beings and enshrined in our laws and social arrangements can be compatible with the idea that, sadly, too often it is undermined in practice.
Much has been written critiquing the Westernized individualism of modern human rights, sometimes with ample justification. However, this concept—the fundamental dignity of all human beings and the prescription to treat people as ends and not means—is not just a Western philosophical concept. Kant’s proposition that we cannot adequately respect our own humanity unless we respect the humanity in others has strong resonances with a number of religious and cultural traditions. The Bible’s “Golden Rule,” for example, calls on people to treat others as they would want to be treated. Similar notions regarding seeing others as full human beings can be found in the beliefs of Jewish thinkers, such as Martin Buber, as well as in Sufi and Hindu traditions. Buber writes about the distinction between relationships grounded in treating others as “Its” or objects—and fuller “encounters” with others as subjects or “Thous.”11 In a similar vein, the rule of dharma in Hinduism basically states, “One should never do that to another which one regards as injurious to one’s own self.”12 “Namaste,” the common Indian salutation, is a humbling acknowledgment of being on equal standing with the person greeted.
In African traditions, there is the notion of “Ubuntu,” which can be roughly translated as “I am because we are.”13 Ubuntu is found in diverse forms in many societies throughout Africa; among the languages of East, Central, and Southern Africa, the concept of Ubuntu captures a world view about what it means to be human.14 Desmond Tutu, the South African archbishop emeritus and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, explains that, on an interpersonal level, Ubuntu means that every person’s humanity is bound up in each other.15 For his part, the scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah, who has West African—Ghanaian—roots, associates his attachment to the idea of dignity with his father, “who grew up in Asante, at a time when the independence of its moral climate from that of European Enlightenment was extremely obvious.”16 Appiah goes on to note that those Asante conceptions depended on a sense of one’s own dignity being connected to the dignity of one’s fellow citizens.17
In stressing universality, I do not want to overstate the claims to uniformity: the essential human qualities that support a claim of worth, dignity, and shared humanity vary across philosophical and religious traditions. In some, there may be a concern for the sentience and the capacity of fellow humans to suffer (and in some philosophers’ arguments this would extend rights to animals as well);18 in some religious traditions, there may be a focus on the quality of having a soul. In a modern human rights framework, dignity is reflected in the human capacity for agency, or self-government, which enables a person to make (and take responsibility for) choices and decisions about one’s self and the course of one’s life.
The kind of self-government necessary for human dignity need not—and, in my view, should not—be understood as autonomy in a vacuum, isolated from societal context. This book is not a philosophical treatise on the nature of our constitutive attachments to others or the voluntariness of our relation to our own ends, which are deeply contested among different philosophical traditions. I believe that both extremes—excessively individualized rights schemes and the kind of cultural relativism that rejects the plasticity of human social arrangements and dignity as a value—are overly rigid.
On the one hand, neither communities nor cultures are stable and monolithic. Reified assertions of unchanging cultural norms empty them of their political content and disconnect them from the realities of how they are used to prop up all sorts of inequitable social norms and power hierarchies.19 We must recognize not only that communal ideals shift over time but also that the notion of a community as a closed circle of group harmony is also false and disregards the multiple identities that we each carry within ourselves.
I am the product of two different religions, national and class backgrounds, and ethnicities, and therefore it may be particularly easy for me to see the false necessity of ascribing one particular identity to any given individual. More generally, however, rigid notions of identity—of gender identity, for example—disregard the multiplicity of meanings that a particular identity (such as gender) has for diverse people. Indeed, the construction of collective identities, based on gender, as well as ethnicity, religion, and race, for example, is a continual and ongoing process, not one definitive event with constant flux stemming from the inherent conflicts within each group.20 As Kant proposed, we humans have the capacity and duty to examine our conscience, which unites out thoughts and feelings, and that capacity can allow us to resist dominant moral codes and create the possibility for reform.21 If we believe in human dignity and the capacity of human beings for choice and agency, it follows then, as I discuss in later chapters, that we cannot accept that identities and roles imposed on people are immutable. In the decades of my doing this work, there have been many times in the most “traditional cultures”—from deep in the Amazon to remote African villages—that I have witnessed transformations in self-understanding about the role of women, which in turn produced changes in behavior with spouses, children, and others, and eventually led to modifications of expectations and group practices. Or sometimes it is judicial decisions, such as the Atala decision by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, that can destabilize social narratives of identity even in a devoutly Catholic context such as Chile regarding the assumption that the “best interests of the child” means a lesbian cannot have custody.22
On the other hand, I also recognize that true self-government requires the power to make meaningful decisions for one’s self within the thick networks of relationships in which we actually live. This requires a conception of being human that acknowledges that we are all embedded in social contexts, and exercising ethical independence in our lives requires navigating the relations in those contexts. As philosopher Charles Taylor argues: “Discovering my own identity doesn’t mean that I work it out in isolation, but that I negotiate it through dialogue, partly overt, partly internal with others.”23 A dynamic relationship and mutual dependence exists between an individual and the conditions as well as between an individual and other people—children, sexual partners, community members, and so on—that allow an individual to develop into a full person.24
Throughout the rest of this book, I argue that a human rights framework based on a notion of dignity as including a respect for the humanity in others contains within it an understanding of our inescapable interconnectedness as members of multiple communities and societies. That interconnectedness, in practice, is shaped by different power relations that affect the possibilities for some people to live with dignity, and in our invariably gendered, racial-ized, class relations, our identities are enacted and reenacted continually in ways that can reinforce or can transform the status quo. Therefore, experiencing dignity is inextricably linked with participating in (re)shaping the conditions of our society, and with who gets to count as a full and equal member.
The narrow liberal idea of rights based on atomistic autonomy is, as we discuss in this and later chapters, connected to an idea of the liberal state. In the nineteenth century, traditional liberal state, male, property-owning, adult citizens were conceived of as free and equal. The role of the state was seen principally in terms of preserving their autonomous liberty, through police, military, and judicial protections. A more modern conception of the state as a welfare state, or a “social state of law” (estado social de derecho), recognizes that the diverse citizens in a society cannot exercise their liberties freely, or participate fully in society, without some background equality in distribution
