In his new book, Dignity: Its History and Meaning, Harvard professor of government Michael Rosen aims to clarify one of the central concepts that informs contemporary thought about human rights and bioethics. For Rosen, dignity is an under-theorized concept, and this fact helps explain the disdain some recent commentators have shown it. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, for example, famously derided the “stupidity of dignity.” (Christopher Kaczor’s very able response to Pinker in the pages of Public Discourse can be found here.) Rosen is no such foe of dignity, though he argues that many, if not most, invocations of dignity today are shrouded in ambiguity and equivocation—which leads to public policy informed by inflated notions of the concept. Rosen sets out to clear these muddy conceptual waters by writing a treatment pitched to the well-informed general reader, not an academic treatise. Yet in the end, he only succeeds marginally in writing a work that is both generally accessible and adequately treats the issues at stake.
Rosen’s short book is divided into three chapters. In the first, he explores the history of Western thinking about dignity and categorizes four different meanings. In the second, he uses this schema to analyze a number of court cases adjudicating dignity. Finally, in the third, he considers how his own favored notion of dignity—dignity as expressions of respect for humanity—raises an ethical puzzle: how do we understand our duty to treat human corpses with dignity when such treatment is of no benefit to the deceased?
Read Full Article »