Does Dignity have a Core Meaning?

Conversations about dignity often start with skepticism about whether the term is too amorphous, too squishy, too subjective to be useful as a legal tool. And this makes sense: of all our rights, dignity is the only one that is innate. It’s not a creation of the law, like freedom of speech or equal rights. We’re born with dignity; it’s an attribute of being human. And because it’s a part of each of us, it’s easy to think that it’s so personal – like part of our individual identity – that it must be different for each of us, so how can it be a measure of the law?

For years, I’ve been asking people all over the world what dignity means to them. And while there’s a range of answers, that range is limited. Most often, people use words like “respect,” “pride,” “honor.” One person in Bhutan said “kindness.” A middle school student in Delaware simply said “good;” another drew a picture of birds flying high in the sky. A child in Haiti says it’s what allows a person to walk “head up” and another says it’s your “personality.” When people elaborate more, they’ll say it refers to how we treat each other, or how we feel confidence in ourselves or the thing that ties all of humanity together or the thing that defines us as human beings. I’ve invited students to express the idea of dignity in six words; some of their efforts are on the Dignity Now! website and echo the same ideas. We don’t use exactly the same words to describe it but we circle around the same themes.

What this suggests is that –regardless of age, gender, or culture – people have an intuitive sense of dignity. And the law reflects those themes.

There are literally thousands of cases from courts around the world — from Canada and Mexico, to elsewhere in Latin America, throughout Europe and Africa, and in many parts of Asia, as well as tribunals at the international and regional levels too — that protect human dignity. There are so many dignity cases, it’s now impossible to keep up with them; our efforts to capture this in our database doesn’t come close to meeting the supply.

The cases concern almost every kind of issue that’s important to people: gender and sexual identity, rights to education and health care and housing, environmental rights, rights against torture and rights to bodily integrity, and much more. And this makes sense: these cases concern everything that is important to how people experience their inherent sense of dignity.

Given the diversity of issues and jurisdictions, you might think that dignity means different things in different places. But in fact, there is what we might call an “overlapping consensus” about the meaning of dignity and its place in the law.

Courts throughout the world talk about legal dignity the same way people think about their own dignity: they demand that the government treat each person “as a person,” whether that means having access to decent housing[1] or being treated decently in prison.[2] They insist that people have access to education[3] so that they can freely develop their personality and that people should be able to make decisions for themselves.[4] They insist that people live in a healthy environment so that they can fully develop their life project.[5] They insist that people treat each other with the respect due another human being[6] and that every person can have hope for the future.[7] They prohibit discrimination[8] and protect the right to vote.[9]

These are some of the fundamental values that people have intuitively about their own lives and personhood.  And this is what dignity law is protecting.

And although courts may describe it differently according to their own language and legal culture, collectively, they are developing a cohesive vocabulary to help us express this most important thing. Even if they sometimes reach different results, they all use the word and the concept of dignity to denote one particularly important truth: every human being has equal worth and equal rights to protect their worth. This is dignity’s core meaning.

[1] Republic of South Africa v. Grootboom, 2000 (11) BCLR 1169 (CC), 23 (S. Afr.).

[2] Walker v. State, 68 P.3d 872 (Mont. 2003)

[3] Miss Mohini Jain v. State of Karnataka, is cited as 1992 AIR 1858

[4] Amparo en Revisión 267/2023, (La Primera Sala de la Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación).

[5] Corte IDH. Caso Habitantes de La Oroya Vs. Perú. Excepciones Preliminares, Fondo, Reparaciones y Costas. Sentencia de 27 de noviembre de 2023. Serie C No. 511.

[6] State v. Makwanyane, Case No. CCT/3/94 (1995).

[7] BVerfG, 2 BvR 2259/04 vom 6.7.2005.

[8] R. v. Kapp [2008] 2 SCR 483, 2008 SCC 41.

[9] Lisbon Case, BVerfG, 2 BvE 2/08, vom 30.6.2009.