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http://www.wikiberal.org/wiki/Gloria_L._Zuniga
http://www.metaphysica.de/texte/mp2004_2-Zuniga.pdf
"The accounts of dignity advanced to date can be divided into three types. The first type is what we shall call the ostensive definition, since it offers only an implicit expression of a definition for dignity. Compared to the other two categories, the ostensive definition is undoubtedly the wallflower of the party, for it goes largely unnoticed despite its longevity and, according to some, its universality across time and cultures. The second type is the rationality criterion, and it is the most recognizable of all three. Although the rationality criterion emerged in the modern period, it is still indeed the dominant position today. The third type, the social account, is the trendiest of all three because it enjoys much favor today inside and outside the academy. The social account has been embraced in contemporary discussions as the rival to the rationality criterion. Let us examine each of these separately in what follows."
"The chief feature of the ostensive definition is that it presupposes the infallible intelligibility of human dignity. The defenders of this position would say that the warrant for this presupposition lies in the nature of each human person to experience the intersubjective recognition of a shared transcendental connectedness to an eternal being.
Accordingly, human dignity is founded on the eternal being of the divine person in whose likeness human persons have been created. In paragraph 1700 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, we find that “the dignity of the human person is rooted in his creation in the image and likeness of God.” The truth of this proposition would be settled by pointing to any individual human person as evidence. If the existence of God is accepted, then the above proposition is ostensively true; hence, the name for this type of definition.
The strength of any ostensive definition depends on the subject’s apprehensibility of the example employed as the instance of the referent. Suppose that we wish to define the color red to a particular subject. Since red is a primitive word—i.e., it is not derived from any other word—we cannot articulate a definition other than an ostensive definition. Accordingly, the standard dictionary definition of red provides only examples, such as the color of a ripe tomato. Let us now suppose that the subject is blind. In this case, we cannot merely point to a vine of ripe tomatoes as an exemplification of the color red. A similar problem arises with an ostensive definition of dignity consistent with the Christian tradition. If the subject has no knowledge of God and his existence, then an ostensive definition will be ineffective for the subject.
It may very well be the case that dignity is a primitive term. If this is indeed the case, then the ostensive definition is weak, for it presupposes the infallible intelligibility of dignity based on a special kind of knowledge (of God) that is empirically demonstrable to be neither uniform across religions, nor universal in the history of mankind; hence, its intelligibility is most certainly fallible.
In the case of the ostensive definition, it is precisely its approach of making the epistemic matter of the knowledge of God its central focus that has made it so assailable by verification objections. A better strategy would be to set aside this particular epistemic matter in order to tackle first the scientific enterprise of examining and describing real states of affairs that manifest dignity in the world in order to show how these descriptions correspond to or reconcile with intuitions about the intrinsic intelligibility of dignity. Additionally, fallibilistic knowledge is a firmer epistemic terrain upon which to rest an ostensive definition of dignity."
"The foremost exemplar of the rational definition is Kant’s ethical account of dignity. Kant’s distinctive concern is to vindicate the authority of reason. A person, he observes, possesses dignity because he is rational and autonomous. It is the mark of humanity to have the ability to choose ends and to pursue them strategically. The reasoning about ends is for Kant the highest form of rationality because it leads the person to what is good, and it also causes him to desire that which is good and thus to pursue what ought to be pursued. The rationality criterion reveals the two fundamental ingredients in the Kantian moral framework: the good and the duty to pursue the good. These make possible for man to self-legislate his own moral life. Autonomy arises in the context of man’s moral self-legislation, which is to act accordingly to those maxims that can be consistently willed as universal law. Kant calls this rational directive the categorical imperative. We are free to accept or to reject the categorical imperative, but only when we accept it do we freely follow our own law of pure practical reason and, thereby, acquire autonomy.
But Kant still needs to explain how dignity is apprehensible by all rational and autonomous persons. For this, he brings his metaphysical framework to bear on this epistemic investigation. When Kant introduced the expression synthetic a priori into the philosophical vocabulary, he circumvented the matter of defining the membership conditions for those judgments in the synthetic a priori category and, instead, took on the task of investigating how synthetic a priori judgments could be possible. He observed that we may find synthetic a priori propositions in mathematics, but he insisted that it is impossible for sensible beings like us to have direct knowledge of mathematical objects, since these are not perceivable by the senses. How, then, could mathematical objects conform to our a priori judgments of them ?
Contrary to the view that we have direct access to things-in-themselves, Kant insisted that our sensible awareness of things-in-themselves is contingent on the structure that we impose on them as representations of what they are, and these representations are the only objects of our experience. We are thus able to have a priori knowledge of the objects of experience, and not of things-in-themselves. In virtue of the categorical imperative, we are able to transcend to this realm of objects of experience because this realm is governed by laws of reason. Our apprehension of dignity in other persons results, then, from the recognition of their rational nature as members of this realm. And since, for Kant, man’s rational nature is an end in itself, he can say that man’s value does not depend on external material ends and, thus, his dignity is intrinsic, unchanging, and eternal.
It is quite plausible to suppose that this formal account of dignity is built around two axioms from which everything else is derived. Axiom 1: Persons will strive to achieve their ends. This axiom is not problematic, since the pre-empirical assumptions underlying this axiom appear intuitively obvious—e.g., persons choose, persons act. But the second axiom gives rise to a problem. Axiom 2: Reason directs persons to the good as an end. Kant’s prototypical exemplar of humanity is the discerning person who recognizes the good and desires it for its own sake. It is not disputable to say that persons often recognize the good and, arguably, that persons have the faculty for recognizing the good.
Yet, it is equally undisputable to say that persons often fail to recognize the good. Sometimes, persons knowingly choose what is wrong and participate in evil deeds with much delight. Reason does not, then, necessarily direct persons to the good. In fact, reason is often used as a tool for justifying wrongdoings. Consequently, reason could potentially be employed to disguise evil.
We must consider, too, the possibility that our knowledge of the good may be obtainable by non-deliberated means. We need only consider any immediate apprehension of beauty, or any immediate recognition of injustice, to find instances in which reason or any sort of deliberation does not mediate our knowing something. If the good is indeed intelligible to man, then it is quite plausible that its intelligibility requires no mediation at all. Kant’s formalism also prevents him from entertaining material considerations, such as particular cases where there are cognitive or psychological obstacles in which the good is either difficult to grasp or not apprehensible at all.
A question jumps to mind. Why assume the noble and duty-bound model of humanity and not the indecorous and self-centered model of humanity? It would seem that the latter model would lead to greater considerations of universalizable maxims. Laws, for example, are inspired by undesirable behavior and so they direct behavior to more desirable ends. In fact, laws exist because transgressions are assumed. Kant’s account breaks down at every exception of the person whose will is determined by reason to pursue the good. In a possible world constituted only by transgressors, a prison for example, is the dignity of any prisoner diminished because his misguided use of reason did not lead him toward the good ? More fundamentally, how is it that the prisoner comes to recognize the good in order to desire it? This question is significant, since according to the Kantian metaphysics we could only know the good as an object of experience and not the good in itself. The good as such is nothing more than a construct of the mind. It is conceivable, then, that the prisoner in whose entire life the good was excluded as an object of experience would not ever know or recognize the good in order to desire it. His mind’s constructs could not shape a noumena in which the good is an object of experience. Here, Kant’s metaphysics betray his moral philosophy because reason in the latter has a quasi realism that stands in the face of his idealism in the former.
Finally, the rationality criterion of dignity does not recognize the dignity of infants, children, the elderly suffering from dementia, and the mentally ill, since no person by this description is either fully rational or autonomous and they are, therefore, excluded by the general rule. It is important to point out that this exclusionary problem does not arise only with the rational account of dignity, but that it is present in the very old description of man’s essential nature as a rational, individual substance. I have argued elsewhere that we can eliminate this problem by simply saying that the potential for rationality is an essential feature of the person.
This application of the Aristotelian framework indeed solves the exclusionary problem of man’s feature of rationality. But let us recall that the Kantian account makes dignity dependent on rationality, which may be characterized as discovering the good, choosing the good as an end, and striving to achieve the good. So if we were to apply this solution to the rational account of dignity, at best we could say that infants and children have the potential to be vested with dignity when their rationality is actualized, and that senile and mentally ill persons are not vested with dignity, since they have either lost or never gained their rational faculties, respectively. This is counter-intuitive and, consequently, it has no practical usefulness."
"There are several variations of the social account, but it would be fair to say that their common feature is the view that dignity arises in the encounters between persons. The two relata in the social process are the conceiver, on the one hand, and the other persons who constitute a social framework, on the other. The relation works like this: the conceiver’s sense of dignity is dependent on the recognition of his personhood by other persons (the social framework) and on the corresponding attitude of regard and compassion from the persons in the social framework toward him as a member of the same kind. But the case may be different, since the conceiver’s dignity may be diminished or strengthened by the responses of other persons in his social framework. The social conception of dignity is, then, putative because dignity is given in beliefs.
The chief difference between the ostensive definition and the social account is that the latter allows for many beliefs, even disparate ones. It is precisely this feature that renders the social definition suspect. And the sources of the differences in beliefs are not limited to culture or some other kind of formation; they also include perspectival variations in an individual. We could imagine instances in which the dignity of some persons is not honored in the same way as some other persons. The Nazis, for example, only honored the dignity of the so-called Arians, and not that of anyone else. This emphasis on beliefs, whether temporally enduring or dependent on circumstances, does not help to clarify what dignity is. In virtue of its underlying assumption that there are many beliefs, the social account must inevitably confront those cases of disagreement and unmet expectations. These cases will reveal instances of failure on the part of some to honor the dignity of others, and this exposure may lead to prescriptive analyses useful for applied ethics.
Another problem of the social account is that it does not recognize the dignity of Robinson Crusoe cases. Most especially, the social account neglects the instantiation of dignity in individuals with autism who cannot fully belong in the human social world even when they are physically a part of it. Yet, our common sense understanding of dignity suggests that persons belonging to any of the categories excluded in this account are fully vested with dignity.
The more perverse consequence of the social account is that it falls prey to relativism. If the dignity of any one person is grounded, either in whole or in part, upon societal consensus, then we can imagine the absence of consensus in a homogeneous society toward persons of a different culture, appearance, language, and so on. The weakness of relativism is that it does not recognize error, our making mistakes, and our just being plain wrong. False judgments are part of the everyday human experience, and the social account makes dignity too susceptible to wrong beliefs. This account is, then, fundamentally unsatisfactory. "
"Dignity belongs to metaphysics—more specifically, to the ontology of personhood—and not to ethics."
-Gloria L. Zuniga, "An Ontology of Dignity", Originally published in German as “Eine Ontologie der Würde” in Ralf Stoecker (ed.), Menschenwürde: Annäherung an einen Begriff, öbv&hpt, Wien 2003, pp. 175-191.
http://www.metaphysica.de/texte/mp2004_2-Zuniga.pdf
"The accounts of dignity advanced to date can be divided into three types. The first type is what we shall call the ostensive definition, since it offers only an implicit expression of a definition for dignity. Compared to the other two categories, the ostensive definition is undoubtedly the wallflower of the party, for it goes largely unnoticed despite its longevity and, according to some, its universality across time and cultures. The second type is the rationality criterion, and it is the most recognizable of all three. Although the rationality criterion emerged in the modern period, it is still indeed the dominant position today. The third type, the social account, is the trendiest of all three because it enjoys much favor today inside and outside the academy. The social account has been embraced in contemporary discussions as the rival to the rationality criterion. Let us examine each of these separately in what follows."
"The chief feature of the ostensive definition is that it presupposes the infallible intelligibility of human dignity. The defenders of this position would say that the warrant for this presupposition lies in the nature of each human person to experience the intersubjective recognition of a shared transcendental connectedness to an eternal being.
Accordingly, human dignity is founded on the eternal being of the divine person in whose likeness human persons have been created. In paragraph 1700 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, we find that “the dignity of the human person is rooted in his creation in the image and likeness of God.” The truth of this proposition would be settled by pointing to any individual human person as evidence. If the existence of God is accepted, then the above proposition is ostensively true; hence, the name for this type of definition.
The strength of any ostensive definition depends on the subject’s apprehensibility of the example employed as the instance of the referent. Suppose that we wish to define the color red to a particular subject. Since red is a primitive word—i.e., it is not derived from any other word—we cannot articulate a definition other than an ostensive definition. Accordingly, the standard dictionary definition of red provides only examples, such as the color of a ripe tomato. Let us now suppose that the subject is blind. In this case, we cannot merely point to a vine of ripe tomatoes as an exemplification of the color red. A similar problem arises with an ostensive definition of dignity consistent with the Christian tradition. If the subject has no knowledge of God and his existence, then an ostensive definition will be ineffective for the subject.
It may very well be the case that dignity is a primitive term. If this is indeed the case, then the ostensive definition is weak, for it presupposes the infallible intelligibility of dignity based on a special kind of knowledge (of God) that is empirically demonstrable to be neither uniform across religions, nor universal in the history of mankind; hence, its intelligibility is most certainly fallible.
In the case of the ostensive definition, it is precisely its approach of making the epistemic matter of the knowledge of God its central focus that has made it so assailable by verification objections. A better strategy would be to set aside this particular epistemic matter in order to tackle first the scientific enterprise of examining and describing real states of affairs that manifest dignity in the world in order to show how these descriptions correspond to or reconcile with intuitions about the intrinsic intelligibility of dignity. Additionally, fallibilistic knowledge is a firmer epistemic terrain upon which to rest an ostensive definition of dignity."
"The foremost exemplar of the rational definition is Kant’s ethical account of dignity. Kant’s distinctive concern is to vindicate the authority of reason. A person, he observes, possesses dignity because he is rational and autonomous. It is the mark of humanity to have the ability to choose ends and to pursue them strategically. The reasoning about ends is for Kant the highest form of rationality because it leads the person to what is good, and it also causes him to desire that which is good and thus to pursue what ought to be pursued. The rationality criterion reveals the two fundamental ingredients in the Kantian moral framework: the good and the duty to pursue the good. These make possible for man to self-legislate his own moral life. Autonomy arises in the context of man’s moral self-legislation, which is to act accordingly to those maxims that can be consistently willed as universal law. Kant calls this rational directive the categorical imperative. We are free to accept or to reject the categorical imperative, but only when we accept it do we freely follow our own law of pure practical reason and, thereby, acquire autonomy.
But Kant still needs to explain how dignity is apprehensible by all rational and autonomous persons. For this, he brings his metaphysical framework to bear on this epistemic investigation. When Kant introduced the expression synthetic a priori into the philosophical vocabulary, he circumvented the matter of defining the membership conditions for those judgments in the synthetic a priori category and, instead, took on the task of investigating how synthetic a priori judgments could be possible. He observed that we may find synthetic a priori propositions in mathematics, but he insisted that it is impossible for sensible beings like us to have direct knowledge of mathematical objects, since these are not perceivable by the senses. How, then, could mathematical objects conform to our a priori judgments of them ?
Contrary to the view that we have direct access to things-in-themselves, Kant insisted that our sensible awareness of things-in-themselves is contingent on the structure that we impose on them as representations of what they are, and these representations are the only objects of our experience. We are thus able to have a priori knowledge of the objects of experience, and not of things-in-themselves. In virtue of the categorical imperative, we are able to transcend to this realm of objects of experience because this realm is governed by laws of reason. Our apprehension of dignity in other persons results, then, from the recognition of their rational nature as members of this realm. And since, for Kant, man’s rational nature is an end in itself, he can say that man’s value does not depend on external material ends and, thus, his dignity is intrinsic, unchanging, and eternal.
It is quite plausible to suppose that this formal account of dignity is built around two axioms from which everything else is derived. Axiom 1: Persons will strive to achieve their ends. This axiom is not problematic, since the pre-empirical assumptions underlying this axiom appear intuitively obvious—e.g., persons choose, persons act. But the second axiom gives rise to a problem. Axiom 2: Reason directs persons to the good as an end. Kant’s prototypical exemplar of humanity is the discerning person who recognizes the good and desires it for its own sake. It is not disputable to say that persons often recognize the good and, arguably, that persons have the faculty for recognizing the good.
Yet, it is equally undisputable to say that persons often fail to recognize the good. Sometimes, persons knowingly choose what is wrong and participate in evil deeds with much delight. Reason does not, then, necessarily direct persons to the good. In fact, reason is often used as a tool for justifying wrongdoings. Consequently, reason could potentially be employed to disguise evil.
We must consider, too, the possibility that our knowledge of the good may be obtainable by non-deliberated means. We need only consider any immediate apprehension of beauty, or any immediate recognition of injustice, to find instances in which reason or any sort of deliberation does not mediate our knowing something. If the good is indeed intelligible to man, then it is quite plausible that its intelligibility requires no mediation at all. Kant’s formalism also prevents him from entertaining material considerations, such as particular cases where there are cognitive or psychological obstacles in which the good is either difficult to grasp or not apprehensible at all.
A question jumps to mind. Why assume the noble and duty-bound model of humanity and not the indecorous and self-centered model of humanity? It would seem that the latter model would lead to greater considerations of universalizable maxims. Laws, for example, are inspired by undesirable behavior and so they direct behavior to more desirable ends. In fact, laws exist because transgressions are assumed. Kant’s account breaks down at every exception of the person whose will is determined by reason to pursue the good. In a possible world constituted only by transgressors, a prison for example, is the dignity of any prisoner diminished because his misguided use of reason did not lead him toward the good ? More fundamentally, how is it that the prisoner comes to recognize the good in order to desire it? This question is significant, since according to the Kantian metaphysics we could only know the good as an object of experience and not the good in itself. The good as such is nothing more than a construct of the mind. It is conceivable, then, that the prisoner in whose entire life the good was excluded as an object of experience would not ever know or recognize the good in order to desire it. His mind’s constructs could not shape a noumena in which the good is an object of experience. Here, Kant’s metaphysics betray his moral philosophy because reason in the latter has a quasi realism that stands in the face of his idealism in the former.
Finally, the rationality criterion of dignity does not recognize the dignity of infants, children, the elderly suffering from dementia, and the mentally ill, since no person by this description is either fully rational or autonomous and they are, therefore, excluded by the general rule. It is important to point out that this exclusionary problem does not arise only with the rational account of dignity, but that it is present in the very old description of man’s essential nature as a rational, individual substance. I have argued elsewhere that we can eliminate this problem by simply saying that the potential for rationality is an essential feature of the person.
This application of the Aristotelian framework indeed solves the exclusionary problem of man’s feature of rationality. But let us recall that the Kantian account makes dignity dependent on rationality, which may be characterized as discovering the good, choosing the good as an end, and striving to achieve the good. So if we were to apply this solution to the rational account of dignity, at best we could say that infants and children have the potential to be vested with dignity when their rationality is actualized, and that senile and mentally ill persons are not vested with dignity, since they have either lost or never gained their rational faculties, respectively. This is counter-intuitive and, consequently, it has no practical usefulness."
"There are several variations of the social account, but it would be fair to say that their common feature is the view that dignity arises in the encounters between persons. The two relata in the social process are the conceiver, on the one hand, and the other persons who constitute a social framework, on the other. The relation works like this: the conceiver’s sense of dignity is dependent on the recognition of his personhood by other persons (the social framework) and on the corresponding attitude of regard and compassion from the persons in the social framework toward him as a member of the same kind. But the case may be different, since the conceiver’s dignity may be diminished or strengthened by the responses of other persons in his social framework. The social conception of dignity is, then, putative because dignity is given in beliefs.
The chief difference between the ostensive definition and the social account is that the latter allows for many beliefs, even disparate ones. It is precisely this feature that renders the social definition suspect. And the sources of the differences in beliefs are not limited to culture or some other kind of formation; they also include perspectival variations in an individual. We could imagine instances in which the dignity of some persons is not honored in the same way as some other persons. The Nazis, for example, only honored the dignity of the so-called Arians, and not that of anyone else. This emphasis on beliefs, whether temporally enduring or dependent on circumstances, does not help to clarify what dignity is. In virtue of its underlying assumption that there are many beliefs, the social account must inevitably confront those cases of disagreement and unmet expectations. These cases will reveal instances of failure on the part of some to honor the dignity of others, and this exposure may lead to prescriptive analyses useful for applied ethics.
Another problem of the social account is that it does not recognize the dignity of Robinson Crusoe cases. Most especially, the social account neglects the instantiation of dignity in individuals with autism who cannot fully belong in the human social world even when they are physically a part of it. Yet, our common sense understanding of dignity suggests that persons belonging to any of the categories excluded in this account are fully vested with dignity.
The more perverse consequence of the social account is that it falls prey to relativism. If the dignity of any one person is grounded, either in whole or in part, upon societal consensus, then we can imagine the absence of consensus in a homogeneous society toward persons of a different culture, appearance, language, and so on. The weakness of relativism is that it does not recognize error, our making mistakes, and our just being plain wrong. False judgments are part of the everyday human experience, and the social account makes dignity too susceptible to wrong beliefs. This account is, then, fundamentally unsatisfactory. "
"Dignity belongs to metaphysics—more specifically, to the ontology of personhood—and not to ethics."
-Gloria L. Zuniga, "An Ontology of Dignity", Originally published in German as “Eine Ontologie der Würde” in Ralf Stoecker (ed.), Menschenwürde: Annäherung an einen Begriff, öbv&hpt, Wien 2003, pp. 175-191.
