Colin Bird teaches at the Department of Politics and directs the Program in Political Philosophy, Politics, and Law (PPL) at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Myth of Liberal Individualism (Cambridge University Press, 1999), An Introduction to Political Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2004, 2019), and most recently, Human Dignity and Political Criticism (Cambridge University Press, 2021). In this new book, Bird explores the concept of human dignity, proposing an alternative to the traditional relation between dignity and respect. This turn helps resolve the worries of ‘dignity-skeptics’ and provides an improved tool for reflection on recent political events. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Bird discusses his view on dignity, his motivation for writing this book, and how it could lead to an improved account of human dignity which takes more seriously our common responsibilities to one another.
What is your work about?
Since at least the second world war, commentators have viewed principled respect for human dignity as a sine qua non for any just and decent society—hence dignitarian idioms are ubiquitous in discussions of ‘human rights’, distributive justice, democratic theory, and much else. This dignitarian turn was supercharged within political philosophy by John Rawls. He mobilized against utilitarianism the Kantian idea that persons as such are entitled to unconditional respect in virtue of their dignity as independent, self-determining, agents. Thanks in part to Rawls’s influence, such dignitarian expectations have become axiomatic for many. Even so, the concept of human dignity remains elusive: ‘dignity-skeptics’ routinely complain that the concept is so elastic as to be philosophically useless. Are they right? My book aims to answer that question, and, more generally, to disambiguate the various senses of dignity relevant to political judgment.
The book maintains that if we confine ourselves to what I call ‘traditional’ conceptions of human dignity, the skeptics are indeed correct. Traditionalists interpret human dignity as an attribute possessed separately by every human person in one of two ways: either (1) as an unchanging ‘intrinsic worth’ implicit in personality as such and its distinctive capacities (autonomy, rationality, ability to pursue projects, etc.); or (2) as an irrevocable moral ‘status’ entitling everyone to ‘equal concern and respect.’ The book critically examines influential efforts to recruit these traditional, possessive, construals of human dignity in political argument and finds them systematically wanting.
However, I believe that the concept of human dignity can be rescued for political criticism, and dignity-skepticism defused, by reversing the traditional relation between dignity and respect. Whereas traditionalists interpret respect as commanded by a dignity already possessed by persons, my revision instead construes human dignity as the result of respect. While upending assumptions made in dominant philosophical and theological traditions, my view more closely tracks the way ‘dignity’ and ‘respect’ actually figure in ordinary language. So, although avowedly ‘revisionist,’ my account claims to restore uses of these concepts familiar in everyday consciousness and to expose dignity-traditionalism as a scholastic distortion. In ordinary life, we never really encounter others as bearers of a special property of dignity that commands respect. Rather, we (dis)respect them as they actually present themselves. But respect and disrespect nonetheless change subsequent the character of interaction, and I maintain that it is here, in mutual uptake, that dignity and indignity enter the picture.
As I construe it, human dignity is to respect as ‘dearness’ is to love. Human dignity no more commands others’ respect than someone’s dearness commands others’ love. Without someone who attends to one in a loving way, and to whom one thereby becomes dear, one cannot partake of ‘dearness’ at all. Hatred, after all, isn’t simply a failure to notice an antecedent property of ‘dearness’ in those to whom it is directed. And when detestation is sufficiently widespread, it is a self-fulfilling attitude, ostracizing its targets in a way that devalues them. Similarly, I claim that to disrespect someone isn’t just to overlook the dignity residing in them, but effects their debasement, to the detriment of a common human dignity. Just as someone becomes ‘dear’ insofar as they are loved, so I maintain that human dignity comes after respect rather than preceding it.
Why did you feel the need to write this work?
The concept of human dignity is typically used to express a claim about the worth of individuals and their lives. More specifically, it purports to capture the idea that human lives matter for their own sakes, rather than merely instrumentally. That intuitively attractive idea is worth preserving. However, I have come to think that traditionalist accounts of human dignity fail to do it justice. The book is motivated by the ambition to render it more successfully.
Dignity-traditionalists say that human lives simply have such value in virtue of their possessing an intrinsic, unchanging, property of human dignity. So understood, human dignity becomes a local entitlement to demand respect from others, one that doesn’t vary with the treatment one actually receives. This can’t, in my view, provide an adequate account of what it is for a life to matter for its own sake. Neither human dignity nor ‘mattering for its own sake’ can be taken for granted in advance, as if already known and settled. I contend, in contrast, that both are dynamic and nonlocal.
They are on my account dynamic in that they vary with agents’ dispositions to attend to, and treat, each other in suitably respectful ways. In other words, whether one matters for one’s own sake in a way that counts for, or contributes to, human dignity cannot be settled in advance, but is rather an uncertain function of whether one in fact receives sincere respect from others. Since that circumstance can vary across time and circumstance, human dignity is not, on my account, unchanging, but rather subject to mutation, enhancement, and attenuation. This feature of my view improves on traditionalist alternatives because it is not clear why, if human dignity is invulnerable and unchanging, its protection carries the adamant importance dignitarians claim for it. Asserting that our inherent dignity survives intact even as we are abused, tortured, enslaved, exterminated, raped, etc. removes it so far from the course of events that it becomes a lifeless abstraction with little critical purchase. In contrast, on my view, human dignity is an uncertain, vulnerable, achievement, constantly at risk as we adjust to each other in the routines of common life.
Human dignity (and an allied idea of mattering for one’s own sake) in my intended sense is nonlocal in that it cannot be isolated as a property or attribute of individuals considered separately, but depends on how others in fact value our lives in their actual dealings with us. It emerges from the affective dispositions—predominantly that of respect—we elicit in others as they encounter us in concrete interaction. For respecting someone involves attending to their legitimate claims before our own, in a range of cases. Such payments of attention are shown (or not) in the (dis)respectful uptake produces in others’ conscious responses. The resulting treatment is, in effect, a token in which that payment is denominated. Such tokens, along with the payments of attention they represent, carry information about whether people value each other for their own sakes. As I construe it, then, human dignity is a covering metaphor for a particularly important dimension—that of respect and contempt—in which the value of lives is mediated through the affective responses of others.
Which of your insights or conclusions do you find most exciting?
This nonlocal conception of human dignity is intriguing because it runs counter to the tendency, implicit in dignitarian discourse and modern political thought more generally, to presume that we each ‘live our lives from the inside,’ as Will Kymlicka has put it. Since we are conscious subjects, thinking, planning, and experiencing always in the light of our personal beliefs and preferences, that presumption cannot be wholly wrong. But I think that it represents only part of the truth, and that it is a mistake to attach too much importance to it in political contexts.
We are not only self-authors, writing the stories of our lives on wholly idiosyncratic terms. How the story works out depends also on how we emotionally affect others, triggering distinctive responses that in turn condition the narrative shape of our lives. Our power to elicit respect from others is particularly important in that regard. And, on my account, the respect that counts toward human dignity is inherently nonlocal, because it reflects how lives are valued from outside. Hence I resist the tendency, which Rawls encouraged, to identify the cause of human dignity with the maintenance of reflexive attitudes like self-esteem and self-respect. These attitudes involve interior self-evaluation, yet we can’t ultimately discern how, and whether, we matter for our own sakes in our social and political routines from this inside perspective. Such judgments require nonlocal information about our lives—facts about the history of our reception in others’ affective responses. This nonlocal character of an agent’s life-narrative is, in my view, more central to human dignity and to political evaluation than are the locally asserted entitlements and grievances that more traditional accounts emphasize.
How is your work relevant to the contemporary world?
The shocking footage of Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd refracts an image of human indignity, if anything does. I’d like to think that my account better explains why than do its traditionalist interlocutors. Was the problem just that Chauvin inflicted lethal violence because he failed to notice the dignity that Floyd inherently possessed and violated legal rights predicated on it? That Chauvin committed a crime is not in dispute, but to put the incident in these terms alone misses the deeper indignity it represents: the nonlocal fact that even something as basic as Floyd’s need to breath failed to trigger any humane response in a public official acting in our collective name. Floyd’s plight exemplifies the still too familiar fact that many in supposedly civilized societies lack the power—thanks to racism, sexism, xenophobia, the libido dominandi, and comparably systemic contempt—to get others to heed their legitimate needs. Those in such a predicament find themselves forsaken. But to be forsaken is not a local fact, appreciable only ‘from the inside.’ It is a nonlocal tragedy, occurring out in an open field of common responsibility.
What’s next for you?
As George Floyd’s murder illustrates, institutions, social forms, conventional norms, etc., dispose the agents who reproduce them to attend to others with respect or disrespect. Allied with my construal of human dignity, this circumstance confers definite critical relevance on dignitarian claims in political reflection. The question is whether the routine encounters such practices encourage recruit attention in ways that secure or threaten a dignified existence to those enmeshed in them. In principle, moreover, my approach renders inquiry along these lines empirically testable. We can study the affective dispositions encouraged or discouraged in the workplace, the lobby, the political party, the labor market, the commercial world, the civil service, the police, the family, the campus, the medical profession, etc., and consider whether they organize attention in ways that promote or threaten human dignity. Although I touch on some of these issues in the book—I discuss hate-speech, punishment, democratic theory, unemployment, among others—the text itself is mostly theoretical, clearing the path for more targeted future work. But I certainly hope to address some of these more specific topics in the years ahead. I’m currently working on a manuscript about the dignity of work and how it bears on judgments about how income should be proportioned to economic contribution. I also hope to shortly publish a book on the history of the concept of dignity, comprising material that had to be excluded from this, more programmatic, text.
What effect do you hope your work will have?
Both in practice and in theory, politics is today increasingly understood in contestatory, agonistic, terms. Viewed from that angle, dignitarian ideals all too often serve as an idiom through which local claims, grievances, rights, or identities fight their corner against presumed adversaries. That’s why Francis Fukuyama’s recent book Identity is subtitled ‘the demand for dignity and the politics of resentment.’ I’d like to think that my revisionist proposal might break the intuitive link Fukuyama and others see between dignitarian ideals and a contestatory ‘identity-politics.’ Dropping the view that human dignity is a local identity demanding recognition for itself, on its own terms, makes room for the alternative view that it’s a nonlocal but real property of social interaction, constituted by patterns of respect carrying information about how societies actually value their members’ lives. I hope that embracing that alternative might nudge citizens away from the competitive, narcissistic, self-assertion of contemporary democratic life, and toward a vision of human dignity that takes more seriously our common responsibility for each others’ lives. My book will have succeeded if it helps others to imagine a healthier mode of democratic engagement, one centered around a common commitment to eliminate the organized forms of contempt that prevent lives from mattering for their own sakes.
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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.
Colin Bird
Colin Bird teaches at the Department of Politics and directs the Program in Political Philosophy, Politics, and Law (PPL) at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Myth of Liberal Individualism (Cambridge University Press, 1999), An Introduction to Political Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2004, 2019), and numerous articles, including in Ethics, The American Political Science Review, Political Theory, PPE, Polity, The Review of Politics, and the European Journal of Philosophy.
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
