Courts around the world use similar language to describe the various aspects of human dignity. These are the essential terms.

Terms relating to the nature of human dignity

  • DescriptWORTH or value means that every life matters. No person is dispensable or disposable. Every life has worth and meaning. A person must be treated “as a person” because that means something; it means that a person can not be treated “inhumanely” – that is, as if they were not a person. Worth is the essential quality of dignity.ion text goes here

  • UNIVERSAL refers to the fact that every person, in past, present and future generations has equal dignity. This is consistent with some religious versions of dignity (e.g. Q’ranic recognition of the dignity of all the children of Adam) but is inconsistent with some historic understandings of dignity that associated it with people of high rank who had certain immunities and privileges due to their status or station. The UDHR changed how we think about dignity: now, the universality of equal dignity is recognized in human rights law throughout the world.on text goes here

  • INHERENT refers to the fact that dignity is innate, born with the human person. It is not granted or defined by the state or by any other person or entity.

  • BODILY INTEGRITY relates specifically to the control that each person must have over their own body. This is why torture, rape, medical experimentation and other attacks on a person’s body offend dignity and can never be countenanced. This is why even voyeurism is prohibited under the Prison Rape Elimination Act (see Chapter 4, III.A.2 below). The body is the physical incarnation of human dignity. Violations of bodily integrity also impair other aspects of human dignity. As the Colombian Constitutional Court has recounted, “the elimination of violence against women is a condition that is indispensable for her individual social development and her full and equal participation in all the spheres of life.”158

  • BELONGING implicates the aspect of dignity that recognizes that no individual lives alone and that our identities are bound up with others. The South African Constitutional Court has been among the most articulate in expounding what we have elsewhere called “the dignity of belonging:” “Every individual is an extension of others.... ‘an individual human person cannot develop and achieve the fullness of his/her potential without the concrete act of relating to other individual persons.’ This thinking emphasises the importance of community to individual identity and hence to human dignity. Dignity and identity are inseparably linked as one’s sense of self-worth is defined by one’s identity.”

  • CITIZENSHIP is more than the formal status of state citizenship. Sometimes, rights are granted only to citizens, with the result that children or people who are migrating who may not have full citizenship status, are denied certain fundamental rights such as the right to vote or the right to work or study. However, every person has equal human dignity, so even those who are not citizens nonetheless always retain the right to have their dignity respected, including the right to participate in society.

  • HUMAN DIGNITY is the quality of inherent worth that each “member of the human family” has in equal measure with every other. In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), it comes from the human capacity for reason and conscience and thus animates the human capacity to make decisions, including decisions about oneself and one’s life.

  • INALIENABLE means that no government or authority may take away a person’s dignity. It can be disrespected or “dented,” but it can not be eliminated or denied. Another way of saying this is that there is no legitimate basis for a person’s dignity to be denied.

  • . EQUALITY and dignity are intimately interconnected but they are not identical. Dignity means that each person has worth and equal dignity means that each person has worth that is equal. Dignity must be distributed in equal measure because if it were not, then some people could decide how much other people’s dignity is worth, and is worth respecting, if at all. The UDHR’s lesson learned from the Holocaust is that no person can define the worth of another. (See “indignities” below).

  • PARTICIPATORY DIGNITY refers to that aspect of human dignity that permits (or requires) engagement in political decision-making in one’s community at the local, national, regional, or international levels. Participatory dignity guarantees the set of rights associated with political authority, including rights to free expression, association, voting, and running for office. Limitations on voting rights especially impair this aspect of dignity.

  • EMPATHY, RESPECT, COMPASSION, GENEROSITY, and similar terms describe the interpersonal relationships that a culture of dignity invites. To treat a person with dignity is to have and express these sentiments. But dignity is far more than these interpersonal forms of connection.

  • FREE AND FULL DEVELOPMENT OF THE PERSONALITY is sometimes given as the purpose of dignity; also thought of as human flourishing. This imposes on the state the obligation to treat each person “as a person,” as an individual. It protects the zone of privacy that allows the person to distinguish themselves from others and to protect themselves from government over-reaching. Education is particularly pertinent to this aspect of dignity, and should include not only vocational education, but educational opportunities that are broad enough to allow a person to grow and thrive and flourish.

  • AGENCY and AUTONOMY are two similar but distinct terms. ‘Agency’ means the capacity to make decisions. ‘Autonomy’ means the capacity to make rules for oneself; it has a more individualistic nuance. While humans should have agency over themselves, they live in community with others and therefore do not live autonomously. Agency recognizes each person’s right to control their own life but we prefer it to autonomy because it accommodates the communal. As the Indian Supreme Court has said, “The right to choose for oneself – be it as significant as choosing the course of one’s life or as mundane as one’s day-to-day activities – forms a part of the right to dignity.”156

  • PRIVACY is related to the free development of the personality and to agency, but it also relates to what Justice Douglas called “the zone of privacy” that was protected by various rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights. It demarcates the lines of individual personhood. The zone of privacy, or zone of dignity, protects not only decisional agency about one’s life choices, but also the right to not self-incriminate, rights relating to what we choose to say or choose not to say, and other rights of conscience that protect our personhood.157

Terms relating to Indignities

  • OBJECTIFICATION. The anti-objectification principle of the German philosopher, Emmanuel Kant (whose work has been extraordinarily influential in dignity law), holds that a person must always be treated as an end in and of themselves, and not as a means to another person’s ends or goals. Thus, a person may not be objectified (“cosificar” in Spanish, to be made into a thing). This principle means, for instance, that a criminal penalty must not be imposed upon a person in order to deter others from committing the same crime because it uses the human being as an instrument of state policy. Sexual abuse is another form of objectification.

  • HUMILIATION is also forbidden because respect for human dignity means that no person may be made to feel “less than” human or less than another. Humiliation may be physical or emotional. Protection from humiliation ranges from the prohibition against torture to protection from defamation or stigmatization.161 The European Court of Human Rights has said that even a single slap on the face from a police officer is a form of humiliation that can constitute a violation of dignity, under the Convention which prohibits demeaning treatment.162

  • VULNERABILITY is a condition of human existence that tends to impair people’s ability to protect themselves. People may be vulnerable for one or more reasons – by virtue of age (high or low), poverty, physical or mental impairment, isolation, or any number of other reasons. Because the state must protect the dignity of every person, it may have an affirmative obligation to take steps to protect the dignity of people with vulnerabilities.163

Terms relating to how the law protects dignity

  • LEGAL DIGNITY represents the idea that while dignity is an inherent human quality, it makes certain demands on the law. While the law does not grant or remove dignity, it can affirm and support it, or it can ignore, deny, and violate it.

  • DIGNITY RIGHTS are the rights – recognized in international and constitutional law – that flow from the recognition of human dignity. These include civil, political, social, economic, cultural, and environmental rights. There is no single or formal definition of dignity rights. This idea derives from the claim of the philosopher Hannah Arendt that dignity is the “right to have rights.”164

  • “INDIVISIBLE, INTERDEPENDENT AND INTERRELATED” describe the relationship among rights. Because dignity rights span human experience, the rights that human dignity protects and that are protected by dignity are interdependent: we need a healthy environment to fully enjoy the right to health and we need education to fully exercise our rights to free expression and voting. Some of these rights are also indivisible in the stronger sense that one can not exist without the other: the right to clean water can not exist without the right to a healthy environment.165

  • NEGATIVE AND AFFIRMATIVE OBLIGATIONS describe the obligations that states have to protect and promote dignity rights. The principles noted above exemplify the distinction. A negative obligation entails government restraint: 1) the government must refrain from any action or practice that violates human dignity. An affirmative obligation entails government action: 2) government must assure that a person has the wherewithal to live with dignity. The US Bill of Rights is written in mostly negative terms (“Congress shall make no law...”) that are usually immediately enforceable with little cost or political impediments. Affirmative obligations require the state to take positive steps such as providing health care, education, and housing so that people can live with dignity. They therefore entail significantly more political and economic investment.

  • PROPORTIONALITY recognizes that respect for human dignity requires that laws be proportionate to their purpose: a law that imposes a much greater burden on a person than what the situation requires is using that person as a means for some purpose and is violating that person’s dignity. This is important in the context of sentencing and carceral discipline.

  •  LA VIDA DIGNA, OR THE RIGHT TO LIVE WITH DIGNITY recognizes that the “right to life” is not only the right to not lose one’s life but the right to live with dignity. This is recognized in international law, in the UN Human Rights Committee’s interpretation of the right to life in Article 6 of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights. And it is established in constitutional law in countries including India (where there is no explicit right to dignity) and including Pakistan, Colombia, and Germany (where there is also an explicit right to dignity.166

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