Recently Published Book Spotlight: Dignity, A History

What is your work about?

Dignity: A History is the first book dedicated to the development of the concept of human dignity. Although various monographs and a few anthologies on the subject of human dignity have included histories of dignity as one part of a bigger project, this is the first book to devote itself to such conceptual history. At the same time, the book doesn’t aim to uncover every possible historical angle. (Can you imagine what it would take to do that, and do it well?) Instead, like other entries into the Oxford Philosophical Concepts series (edited by Christia Mercer), the goal is to tell a particular history. It’s was aimed at tracing and analyzing the development of our present-day, western notion of human dignity, understood roughly as the inherent or unearned worth that all human beings enjoy equally, and which grounds certain fundamental rights or protections.

The book asked, how old is this concept of dignity? What were its major developmental milestones? How coherent is it? Were there divergent historical notions of dignity, and if so, what were they? But also, and crucially, is our present day understanding of dignity wrapped up with any false beliefs or assumptions about its conceptual history?

Through a joint effort by a wide-ranging group of international experts, Dignity: A History tries to answer these questions. In the process, the book ends up toppling or at least seriously challenging a number of platitudes about the concept. For example, consider the biblical dictate of imago Dei, which is often held up as a historical origin of our notion of dignity. In her chapter, Bonnie Kent convincingly challenges this claim. She shows that the medieval tradition of the Latin West and its understanding of imago Dei simply can’t be reconciled with today’s moralized concept of human dignity.

Or consider the more philosophically famous story that our notion of dignity is owed to the genius of Immanuel Kant. Not only does Oliver Sensen show that it’s a longstanding interpretive mistake to think Kant grounds our obligation to respect others on a value that the other possess, Sensen also shows that ‘dignity’ wasn’t even the name Kant gave to this value. On top of this, Stephen Darwall shows in his chapter that insofar as Kant was contributing to our thinking about human dignity, he was following the leads of his forebears, tracing back at least to the 17^th century jurist, Samuel Pufendorf.

These are just a few examples. One of the most exiting results of Dignity: A History is the number of surprises it holds for readers. The conceptual history of dignity simply isn’t what most people think, or would even guess.

How does this book fit in with your larger research project?

Over the last decade, my work has centered on the dual questions of human worth and respect. But I’ve always had a two-prong research program, splitting my work between contemporary ethics and the history of ethics. In particular, I made my bones partly through scholarship on David Hume and Adam Smith, whose sentimentalist ethics greatly influenced my earliest thinking. However, in doing this work on Hume and Smith, I became increasingly worried about a challenge that dogged the early 18^th century sentimentalists (at least in retrospect), as well as their contemporary heirs, namely, the nature and authority of other-regarding duties and reasons. Speaking only to the historical side of this challenge: by and in large these thinkers didn’t leave room for a normative notion of human dignity. Instead, they fell back on suspect principles of universal benevolence or high flown talk about humanity.

Hume is a great example of this. Hume uses the term ‘humanity’ frequently, especially in his later work, the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Contemporary scholars have sometimes tried to stretch this talk of humanity to cover their intuitions about human dignity, but this is dubious. As part of his critique of Hutcheson, Hume explicitly denies any original care or concern for others “merely as such” (Treatise 3.2.1). Moreover, and more to the point, as I argue in a 2007 paper, ‘humanity’ for Hume names a disposition to care about others, when and if their character or what befalls them is “brought home” to us through what he calls ‘sympathy,’ but we would call empathy (or a kind of empathy). In other words, Hume argues that if I come to empathize with your
joys or sorrows, hopes or fears, then I will likely take a caring interest in them and you as well. This is a far cry from the idea that I owe you some kind of care or concern or respect, and owe this to you just because you are a human being.

Granted, I’ve argued in another paper that Adam Smith is an exception among the early sentimentalists. As I read him, Smith does offer a substantive notion of dignity. But I’d be the first to admit that appreciating Smith’s view isn’t straightforward. His argument is indirect. So, even Smith’s account reflects the way that the idea of human dignity has a marginal place within sentimentalist ethics — and not just historically, but also today. After all, the contemporary revival of sentimentalist ethics was largely the result of the 20^th century rise of metaethics, and its debates about the metaphysics of value and moral semantics. Normative sounding subjects like human dignity just weren’t what the revivalists were interested in.

This brings me back to the connection between Dignity: A History and my larger research project. The irony of the sidelining of human dignity is that sentimentalism implicitly suggests a rich alternative to the dominant rationalist conception of the moral person that is the usual touchstone for contemporary accounts of human dignity. In the sentimentalist view, to be a person (again, morally speaking) isn’t, or isn’t only, to be a being capable of acting for reasons. It’s to be a passionate being, whose emotional responses to the world are essential to explaining our beliefs and judgments about what’s valuable and meaningful, both privately (that is, “to me,” or “to you”) and inter-personally (“for me understanding you,” or “you understanding me”).

To put this another way, passions aren’t simply something that persons have, which reason must somehow “reckon with” or “regulate” or “overcome.” Instead, passions constitute, in a positive sense, who we are, as moral persons. I’ve sometimes referred to this as “affective agency,” and the resulting conception of the moral person (especially in the historical tradition), the “passionate person.”  But whatever terms we use, it was this conception of the person that I began to think could (and perhaps in some historical cases did) offer the building blocks of an alternative theory for human dignity.  

However, as I began to tease these ideas out, I found myself doing more than just working out a theory of dignity. I was working out a new theory of respect — that is, of what it is to respect persons as persons, or “just because” they are persons. By centering the lived, passionate experiences of persons, and in particular, their perspective on their own experiences, I was able to capture what I took to be the main intuitions that sentimentalists were brining to the table about the nature of the moral person. And when I asked myself what it meant to respect this aspect of moral personhood, I concluded that it was a kind of understanding. But – and this is crucial – my claim isn’t that understanding is instrumental to respect. My claim is that, under certain conditions,  to understand a person’s particular perspective on their experiences constitutes a way of respecting them.

Articulating and defending this claim has been my focus over the last two years. My present monograph, tentatively entitled, Rethinking Respect & The Promise of the West, will be a comprehensive statement of this view. It will also include, as one part of that statement, a conceptual history of respect, c1700-present, to complement my historical work on dignity.

How have readers responded?

To the bigger research project, the response has been very encouraging. Granted, much of what I want to say has not yet been published, but instead will appear first in the Rethinking Respect book, which I’m presently finishing (although you can find some first moves in my anthologized chapter, “ Understanding Persons and Problem of Power”). But for the last couple of years I’ve been presenting parts of the view in a wide variety of settings, which has led to some great feedback.

In particular, I was part of Stephen Grimm’s  “Varieties of Understanding” project a few years ago, which was funded by the Templeton Foundation. That’s when I formulated the crucial connection between respect and understanding. And that project, as well as its ensuing workshops and downstream conferences, connected me to some wonderful minds working in epistemology in general, and on the topic of understanding in particular, such as Grimm himself, Michael Strevens, Kate Elgin, Jenann Ismael, Kareem Khalifa, Olivia Bailey, Michael Hannon, Antonia Peacocke, and Alison Hills (among others). The critical challenges and constructive suggestions these thinkers offered really helped me refine the view (I even think I’ve brought Michael Strevens around, but it may take another cucumber smash atop the Empire Hotel to close that deal.)

One thing I’ve learned from these various presentations: I must make clear that the goal of my larger project isn’t to reject the basic rationalist claim. Some have misinterpreted me that way. I’m not rejecting the idea that what it takes to respect persons as persons involves recognizing them as rational beings. My goal is to complicate this idea. The intuitive starting point is that being a person isn’t only about rationality. Being a person is about feeling, and emotion, and experience. And not in an ancillary way. Joy, pride, hope, love, anger, grief, shame, sadness. These passions shape the significance and meaning that our experiences have for us. In turn, these experiences, and not only our choices or deliberations, shape our moral sense of self — the “me” for whom I expect or demand respect, and the “you” to whom I owe it. Perhaps this sounds obvious. But western philosophy has a long, long history of discounting such aspects of moral personhood and a consequent tendency to circumscribe membership in the space of respect.

Indeed, this is partly where Dignity: A History comes in. This anthology sets the historical record straight; or at least, it does some of the straightening. It shows that the rationalist paradigm of human dignity is not the only historical model we have to draw on. As a result, this anthology loosens the conceptual space for those who, like me, are interested not just in thinking about human dignity, but rethinking it. And, as far as this anthology goes, the reception has been enthusiastic. I’ve fielded some complaints about this or that particular bit of history not being included in the volume, but I can’t help wondering if these antagonists glossed over the introduction, which states what I said earlier, namely, that the book doesn’t aim to tell the whole conceptual history of dignity. (Indeed, none of the books in the Oxford Philosophical Concepts series have that aim, a point Christia Mercer makes clear in her own series introduction.) Anyway, by and in large the response has been very positive. And some of that response has come from pretty far outside philosophy. For example, it’s connected me to some people working in global aid organizations where the value of human dignity is at the fore. These connections have proven interesting and rewarding.

Why did you feel the need to write this work?

The real question is, why did I feel the need not to write a book, but to edit an anthology? The truth is, prior to starting this anthology, I entertained the idea of a single author monograph on the history of dignity. In 2009, I published an essay entitled “Dignity’s Gauntlet,” which offered a sweeping critical take on present scholarship about human dignity, including, in part, its conceptual history. But the deeper I got into the history, the more I came to believe that my plan smacked of hubris. I realized that to tell the history of human dignity, and to tell it well – with the subtly and rigor I think good history of philosophy demands – required a team of experts.

Thankfully, at about the same time I reached this conclusion, Christia Mercer launched Oxford Philosophical Concepts. One of the first volumes in this series was on the concept of ‘sympathy,’ edited by Eric Schleisser, whom I knew from our shared interest in Hume and Smith. Eric new that I had additional research strengths around the subject of empathy, including from a contemporary and empirical angle, and invited me to write an entry explaining the connection between ‘sympathy’ and ‘empathy,’ as the latter concept emerged in the late 19^th century. This became my chapter, “From Einfühlung to Empathy: Sympathy in Early Phenomenology and Psychology.”

Anyway, there was a workshop for the sympathy volume, where authors shared drafts. Mercer was contributing to that volume herself, so of course we met. And as luck would have it, we sat together for the first dinner. At the end of an electric conversation, over some pretty good craft beers if I recall correctly, she asked me, “Would you be interested in editing a book in the series, and if so what would you want to do it on?” I answered instantly, “Dignity!” And that’s how I got the opportunity to do what I knew the history of dignity demanded: an anthology.

And when I look back through the contents, I remain convinced this was the right decision. Even though Dignity: A History doesn’t attempt to tell the whole story of dignity, the parts that it does tell are subtle, rich, and complicated. In addition to what I’ve said already, it runs from the ancient world to the present, and includes entries on diverse intersections and influences, including a possible proto-concept of dignity in the Homeric Epics (Patrice Rankine), connections to Buddhist thought (David Wong), the classical Arabic concept of dignity (Mustafa Shah), the way the concept was taken up in post-reformation painting (Edward Town), its role in present day debate over the death penalty (Emma Kaufman), its contested place in bioethics (Marcus Düwell), and even a meta-reflection on what it means to offer a history of dignity (Charles Mills). It treats in careful detail lesser-known thinkers, such as Giannozzo Manetti (Brian Copenhaver); well-known but understudied ones like Denis Diderot (my own chapter); as well as well-known but highly nuanced thinkers, such as W.E.B. Du Bois (Bernard Boxill). It scrutinizes the notion of dignity in contexts already embedded in long and complex scholarly literatures, including the Stoic notion of dignitas (the late and incomparable, Miriam Griffin), as well as how dignity evolved in conceptual contexts that have been complicated  by the diffuse ways we’ve theorized them over time, in particular, the context of work and labor (Somogy Varga, Christine Henderson, Mika LaVaque-Manty).

As I said, this was not a task for an expert. It was a task for a team of experts.

Who has influenced your work the most?

Like most scholars, I’m deeply indebted to my mentors, especially Charles Griswold, Stephen Darwall, Elizabeth Anderson, and David Velleman–also Phoebe Ellsworth, who schooled me on psychology (and whose intellectual generosity and wry wit helped get me through graduate school). In particular, anyone who reads my constructive work on dignity and respect will note its second-personal dimension, which is no accident. I was at Michigan while Darwall was writing, The Second-Person Standpoint. And I was early on deeply influenced by the moral philosophy of Adam Smith, which I first studied with Charles Griswold as an undergraduate at Boston University, while he was writing his, Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment. Charles also became a dear friend over time. To this day, there is no one I’d rather talk philosophy with over a leisurely stroll or good bottle of wine.

But the biggest influence on my thought has undoubtedly been Memphis. First, it’s where I met some of the sharper minds I know in this business, and which I’ve had the good fortune to be around daily, including Deborah Tollefsen, Mary Beth Mader, or the late John Tienson (with whom I once co-taught a seminar on Hume’s Treatise – a real highlight of my career). Most important in this respect, Memphis is how I met Stephan Blatti, who became another cherished friend, but also my most honest, most generous, and most productive intellectual interlocutor (I think he’s cited in half a dozen of my papers!).

Second, and more profoundly, Memphis is where my philosophical horizons truly opened up. The Department of Philosophy at Memphis has long been known for its philosophical pluralism. And although the exact way the department has realized this pluralist identity over the years has varied, what’s remained constant is a commitment to the value of thinking philosophically from different perspectives and different traditions. At Memphis, we roll our eyes at that most obnoxious question, “Why is this philosophy?”, and instead assume that philosophy is many things. It has many motivations. Many methods. Many histories. Many forms.

Part and parcel of this pluralism is a long tradition of supporting research and teaching in historically marginalized areas of philosophy. Feminism, African American Philosophy, Trans Studies, Philosophy of Race, Gender Studies, Critical Theory, and so on. I just didn’t get much exposure to this in my own training. Learning about these fields, their debates, their methods, their histories, but also engaging with and forming my own scholarly relationships with some of the brilliant students and scholars specializing in these areas —  it’s hard to to describe the influence these experiences have had on me. It’s stimulating, obviously. And in the bigger context of a pluralist department, it’s been intellectually liberating.  But it’s also deeply challenging. It’s made it impossible for me to stay entrenched in my assumptions – and believe me, I arrived in Memphis with a suitcase full of them, including many I didn’t know I was carrying.

In short, I’ve done as much rethinking as I’ve done thinking at Memphis. And there is a subtly and depth in my work now that reflects the diversity of influence I’ve experienced here. I don’t believe this would be true had I built my career elsewhere.

Do you see any connections between your professional work and personal life?

Definitely. Some of the assumptions that I alluded to above, which I needed to rethink, were abstract. They related to high level presuppositions about philosophical methodology. But others, especially when it came to social, political, and moral philosophy, were much more personal, and connected to my identity as a white male.

To be clear, I didn’t arrive at Memphis clueless. My parents were hippies, who among other things spent three years in Ghana in the peace-corps. They both retained a deep love and appreciation for African as well as Caribbean cultures, and my father in particular was keen to educate us in this regard, taking us to African cultural performances and celebrations, hosting exchange teachers, and so on. And while we were not wealthy, he found a way to pay for me to spend six weeks living with a Senegalese family in Dakar after I finished high-school.

Meanwhile, my mother came out of the closet when I was three, with the result that half of my “growing up” took place in the gay community of Rochester, NY. For most of my life I had a home with two mothers in it. I spent summer weekends grilling out with my mother and her friends (who always did the fourth of July better than – well, everyone). And I have early memories of going to Gay Pride events. At the same time, I have memories of wrestling with the homophobia that was, of course, everywhere around me (something I touch in Rethinking Respect).

On top of this, my step-mother (who came into my life when I was 5, so really just another mother), spent the better part of her career advocating for racial justice and leading diversity education workshops for communities, schools, universities, and private industry. In fact, she gave me the copies of Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well and Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream that I still use today. I mean, this was a seriously Enlightened woman – indeed, much more than I realized in my youth, which brings me back to my point.

Since coming to Memphis, I realize how much further I had to go. For one thing, even with my relatively enlightened upbringing, I had done very, very little philosophical work on the issue of oppression. I took the awareness that I was raised with for granted. Hell, I hadn’t even yet read those books my mother in law gave me cover to cover. I’d read some of the chapters, and thought that I understood them (now, that’s white privilege for you!) And, to be honest, relative to my white peers, I was enlightened. So, it was easy for me to fall into a common story that those with privilege tell themselves — a story that emphasizes the moral progress of our western ethos, while at the same time, with a million sleights of hand, continually turns our attention away from the ongoing realities of inequality and oppression, and away from our own role in enabling those realities.

But Memphis has profoundly changed how I think about all this, including how I think of myself. And this happened not only because I was coming into my intellectual maturity in a pluralist department where questions of race, and power, and oppression are standard fare. That’s definitely part of the explanation. But it’s more than that. The city of Memphis as a whole is wound up tightly with the history of white oppression in America. To live here, in this town, is to be constantly connected to that legacy. You witness its concrete manifestation in the ongoing inequalities that people of color struggle to overcome. You hear its story in the music. You see its protest in the art. You drive by it each time you pass by the Lorraine Motel, or stop, and just sit with your eyes fixed on that balcony, while tourists touch the little metal button outside that brings the unforgettable voice of Dr. King into the world again, even if for just a minute.

And, importantly for me as an academic, at Memphis, you are party to myriad intellectual efforts to understand oppression, remedy it, or resist it. For, it’s not just in my department that questions of power, or social injustice, or inequality are constantly being put on center stage. It’s all around! From History to Sociology to English to Music to Public Health to Engineering to Political Science – the University of Memphis is constantly engaging the challenges and consequences that stem from these issues. Faculty across the university work on them. The Administration pays attention to them. There is always some guest speaker or conference on the horizon scheduled to address them. And our students are thirsty to learn about them. In short, you could say that at Memphis, these issues are in the water.

So, now maybe you can understand me when I say that there is only so far one can get working on the subjects of human dignity and respect in Memphis, before one must face up to the obscene hypocrisies that run through our western ethos and all its high talk of “justice and equality for all.” In particular, there is only so far you can get before you face, in a personal way, the connection between this hypocrisy and the legacy of white oppression, especially if you’re white like me. As Chris LeBron once put it, if you’re white and you’re going to write about this stuff, you have to be willing to lean into it.

For me this has meant rethinking the ways that my own life has been seeded with hypocrisies, even in the midst of my relatively enlightened childhood. It’s meant trying to understand how my father, my mother, my step-mother, my family, me – how we all still got caught, and keep getting caught, in that trickster story of progress I mentioned above. This has been both a personal and philosophical struggle. And I know I have more to do.

Or better, because closer to the truth, I will always have work to do. This is part and parcel of what my new book, Rethinking Respect, is about. On the one hand, it’s an attempt to examine the western ethos of respect, to confront its hypocrisies, and to explain the way it’s undermined by the story of progress. On the other hand, it’s an attempt to give us an alternative way of thinking about respect and human dignity that might help us break free of that story, or at least develop the skills to resist it. White people, and especially white academics, like to think they understand oppression, and in turn that they respect those who are oppressed. They “have” the necessary understanding. But on my view, respect isn’t a static accomplishment. You don’t “figure out” what it is, and master it like some moral skill or knowledge. Instead, to respect another person as the particular person they are, is a dynamic thing. It requires continual renewal. Human dignity, in this way, demands vigilance.

What’s next for you? 

One thing I’ve been thinking more about is how the question of dignity bears on the rising complexities of living in an “A.I. World.” This might seems like a departure from what I’ve talked about so far. But I’m thinking both about what it would mean for A.I. to have or acquire dignity (a fascinating question on its own), but also, and more importantly, how A.I. changes the way we think about our human dignity — or, what amounts to the same thing, the way we humans think of and treat (or don’t) each other as beings with dignity. I’ve given a few preliminary talks on these issues. And, as next step, I’ll be presenting a paper at the 2020 APA Pacific entitled, “The Moral Status of A.I.”, in a symposium session with Amanda Sharkey, David Gunkel, John Sullins, and Erica Neely.

I’m also looking forward to turning some attention back to history. As Editor of the Southern Journal of Philosophy, I started a new Workshop Series that involves a spring conference and corresponding publication. The idea is to bring together senior scholars with intermediate and early-career researchers to explore new philosophical directions on a particular theme (and, cool note, everyone who is accepted gets funding!). The first of these workshops was on “The Epistemology of Justice,” and featured Elizabeth Anderson and Chris LeBron. It will be published as the first issue in the new volume (2020). The next one is on “The Ethics of Big Data,” and features Michael Lynch and Josh Fairfield. But in 2021, the theme will be “Early Modern Social Justice.” It will feature Susan James, Samuel Fleischacker, and James Harris. I’m planning to use that as a focus point to gear up some new work of my own in the history of ethics.

That said, really it’s the book, the book, the book! I know this isn’t technically next, but it’s the horizon I’m most focused on. Rethinking Respect has been very difficult to write, and not just because of the personal connection I described above. Over the last few years I’ve increasingly tried to write in a more approachable, less academic style. This has taken conscious effort. You really have to retrain yourself, to some degree. At least, I did. I feel that I made a huge leap forward with my 2018 essay for Aeon, “Dignity is Delicate.” But carrying this style through a monograph-length project has been slow. So I’m excited to be as close as I am to completing this new book, but also looking forward to taking a deep long breath when it’s done.

You can ask Remy Debes questions about his work in the comments section below. Comments must conform to our community guidelines and comment policy.

*

The purpose of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is to disseminate information about new scholarship to the field, explore the motivations for authors’ projects, and discuss the potential implications of the books. Our goal is to cover research from a broad array of philosophical areas and perspectives, reflecting the variety of work being done by APA members. If you have a suggestion for the series, please contact us here.