Cresswell Riol

I will now approach human dignity from another angle: as an “outer” sense that can be lost; that is fragile, precarious, and needs protecting. This is arguably in line with what Valentini classifies as “status” dignity, “comprising stringent normative demands,”48 Meilaender calls “personal,”49 or Gilabert refers to as “condition-dignity”: a descriptive and not necessarily universal version that concerns the extent to which an individual is able to exercise the universally shared capacities they possess through their innate dignity—what Gilabert labels “status-dignity.”50 Pogge makes the distinction between human dignity as intrinsic and inalienable, and personal dignity, as subjective and related to an individual’s sense of their own worth.51 He also points out how this form can be found in the UDHR: Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for [their] dignity and the free development of [their] personality [my italics]. As Jütten recognises, when one discusses human dignity using this framing, the focus shifts from the conceptual and ontological to the phenomenological and sociological.53 Calnan, Badcott, and Woolhead refer to this as focusing on “dignity’s existential components and their operationally relevant arena, the life world”: “the meaning of our being human within social contexts.”54 Human dignity of this kind is more easily recognised by its absence or when it is denied 55—indignity—revealing itself as feelings of shame, humiliation, embarrassment, degradation, abasement, loss of pride, or even guilt. Such emotions can lead to a negative evaluation of the self, culminating in societal withdrawal, the inability to take transformative action, and alienation.56 Hence, despite the innate and alienable nature of dignity, people live lives that are undignified. As much as the emotions listed above are very personal or self-conscious emotions, they are co-constructed with the social environment: thereby, indignity involves an internal sense of inadequacy combined with an inflicted or concocted external judgement.57 Davis argues that systematic humiliation reduces self-respect by “denying individuals membership in a community or reducing their status in a community—in their own eyes”:58 “[m]aking human dignity a central value of social-economic policy, then, means changing social institutions to eliminate humiliating institutions.”59

Katharine Cresswell Riol