Dignity and Objectification
One of the worst things you can do to another human being is to objectify them – literally, to treat them as if they were a thing, and not a person. Objectification happens when one person uses another for their own purposes, the way you would use an object.
Courts all over the world have used the “anti-objectification” principle to protect human dignity in a wide range of situations.
In one landmark decision, the German Constitutional Court invalidated a law that would have allowed the German government to shoot down a passenger plane if it had reason to believe that the plane was going to be used for terroristic purposes (as in a 9/11 situation). The Court explained that killing the passengers on board the plane – even if justified by the saving of many more lives – was nonetheless an unconstitutional violation of the passengers’ dignity because it “ignores the status of the persons affected as subjects endowed with dignity and inalienable rights,” and instead “By their killing being used as a means to save others, they are treated as objects.” This objectification denies them “the value which is due to a human being for his or her own sake.”
The Spanish Constitutional Court has held that sexual harassment in the workplace violated a worker’s dignity because it objectified her.
In Colombia, the Constitutional Court held that in cases of rape, “the woman’s dignity is subjugated by the force necessary to convert her into an object of he who exercises power over her. Similarly, her dignity as a human being is denied when the legislator imposes on the woman, likewise against her will, the obligation to serve as an instrument effectively to procreate by penalizing abortion without any exception. . . . In these cases, [to prohibit abortion] would be to objectify the woman as only a womb, separated from her consciousness.”
In 2023, the Mexican Constitutional Court similarly invalidated a restrictive abortion law, explaining that “in its essence, dignity is the inherent interest of every person, just by the mere fact of being a person, to be treated as a person and not as an object, to not be humiliated, degraded, debased, or objectified.”
In Taiwan, the collection of personal information – whether data or fingerprints or otherwise – has also been held to violate dignity because it reduces human beings to data, to be used by others for their own purposes.
To objectify a person is to violate their dignity in every essential way. It violates the equality principle that is central to dignity because it allows one person to impose their will on another and effectively shape them. It denies the autonomy principle because it transfers the authority to make decisions for oneself from the dignity holder to another person. It often denies privacy because the objectifier often uses their power over the dignity holder to invade the dignity holder’s private sphere and, often to violate their body, thereby breaching the principle of bodily integrity. It violates the principle of inherence, which recognizes that human dignity exists in every human being not because we are useful to someone but simply because we are born human. Objectification can have long-lasting psychological effects precisely because it cuts right to a person’s sense of self.
Historically, the anti-objectification principle is often traced back to Emmanuel Kant, who articulated a categorical imperative based on the idea of human dignity: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, both in your person and in the person of each other individual, always at the same time as an end, never as a mere means.”
This applies to all people, even those who have been convicted of crimes: In Peru, which has explicitly adopted the Kantian imperative, the Constitutional Tribunal said in one case about the equality rights of prisoners, that the principle of the dignity of the person “insists that human beings may not be treated like things or instruments (but rather as subjects of rights and obligations) . . . since each person, including criminals, should be considered as an end in and of himself.” The South African Constitutional Court has applied this even to people convicted of capital crimes. The Court held that the death penalty “involves, by its very nature, a denial of the executed person’s humanity,” which is “degrading because it strips the convicted person of all dignity and treats him or her as an object to be eliminated by the state.”
A legal system that uses human beings to advance its own ends or that allows others to do so is not operating under “a just rule of law,” to use the language of the American Bar Association.