Ethics, Technology, and Society

This is a good post by Udo Schuklenk. His point should be well-taken.

Human dignity is often hailed as a reason to do such and such. But it is conspicuously available as a argumentative foundation to any side of an issue. This raises the question whether or not it is a useful concept, or fit for the bin.

I offer up a comment to his post, which I quote here:

If you ever want to get a sense of whether a concept is useful or not, ask a lawyer.
I did a brief stint at the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. A colleague of mine was wondering one day if there was any merit in basing an argument against workplace surveillance on the employees’ dignity.

I suggested there was not, on the grounds that dignity has always seemed a rather empty term, or at least one that could easily be reduced to other more meaningful concepts, as you so clearly point out.

As it happened a (senior) lawyer colleague of ours entered the discussion and immediately suggested that dignity was a relatively useless term. As an analogy, she pointed to some of the troubles that the law has experienced in settling on the meaning of an equally problematic term, namely the “rational person”. The “rational person” is often employed as a legal standard. It has taken many decades to settle on what is meant by the term, yet is is still hotly contested.

“Dignity”, she argued, is many decades behind in its definition. The result is that it is effectively a useless concept if one’s goal is a clear, persuasive argument; it is sufficiently empty to be used equally (in)effectively by anyone!

The point of this is that “dignity”, in the absence of some meaningful definition (one that is currently, and conspicuously unavailable), ought to be chucked.

I am always suspicious of people who argue for the “dignity” of this or that, and most often assume that it is used by people who haven’t really thought much about the argument they are trying to make, in the rare cases that they are indeed making a well-formed argument. Most often, “dignity” is offered up as the argument, leading the more attentive listener to recognize it as mere rhetoric.