Just as an essay, though, the construction around the ice-cream quote is masterful.
But even so, I think it's a more useful concept than dignity. It's pretty hard to have a viable system of ethics without some concept of coercion, wherever you draw the boundaries of the term. You can manage pretty well without including "dignity" though.[ Parent ]
The obvious is answer is because humans have dignity, an internal worthiness and an attribute which most people think that other beings either lack or have in a lesser degree. But there are probably other ways to answer that question. So YMMV.
In one sense, your average horse is probably more dignified than your average reality TV contestant. From the ice-cream analogy in TFA, it seems that that meaning of dignity is considered to be the same concept as the "internal worthiness" you mention. It does seem a bit frivolous to combine the two senses into one.[ Parent ]
But as for TFA, I think Pinker spends too much time agonizing over what is probably best summed up as `GWB puts together another council based on personal loyalty and ideology rather than merit; the expected results follow.'
Likewise, a cow intends to be a cow. Reducing that cow to hamburgers is a violation of its cowness and subsequent intent to remain a cow.
On the face of it, it isn't clear to me that violation of a person's will to hold onto a particular personal possession or to commit a particular act is different in kind. It does seem to me to be clearly different in extent in that men and women have more sophisticated wants, desires, and intentions. Aquinas, adopting a very Aristotelean understanding of being, thought that this complexity alone was sufficient to justify the violation of the being of lower ordered (less complex) creatures for the sake of higher ordered (more complex) creatures. So for an animal to eat a plant is a net good but for a plant to eat an animal is a net evil. And of course, he put humans at the top of all of these orders.
In this view, the dignity of the human person, who alone among material creatures is created in the likeness of God, does not vary from human individual to human individual. Consequently, the violation of will of one person by another person is also a violation of dignity.
But that's just one view. I'm sure that there are other views of dignity and of will. My only real point is that I don't think the question of free will is any less nebulous with regards to public discourse as the idea of dignity. Different schools of thought have different ideas on what it means to be free just as they have on what it means to be human and to be dignified.
But it seems to me as it's used in the extracts from that article, "dignity" combines two distinct concepts.
Dignity A is the quality that makes one eat an ice cream with a spoon instead of licking it.
Dignity B is the quality that determines whether an entity is considered to be a human being.
I don't think it's sensible to combine these into a single concept, because of difference between them.
Dignity A is highly culturally dependent. Old ettiquette manuals explain how to eat bananas in a dignified manner by cutting them up with a knife and fork. That would be considered absurd in most contexts now. However, dignity B really should be as culturally independent as possible.
Also, people generally try to make Dignity B a binary concept: an entity either has human rights or does not. Declaring some entities to have only a limited degree of humanity has produced some rather unpleasant consequences in the past. Dignity A however seems to be a scalar quality, which exists in a variety of different degrees.
So, combining these two qualities together seems to me a poor choice, since that means combining a binary, culturally-independent quality with a scalar, culturally-dependent quality; and saying that they are essentially the same things.[ Parent ]
