Respect for Dignity: A Defense
by
Craig Duncan
Ithaca College
10/06 draft
Abstract. In a recent article Martha Nussbaum identified three problems with the Stoic
doctrine of respect for dignity: its exclusive focus on specifically human dignity, its indifference
to the need for external goods, and its ineffectiveness as a moral motive. This article formulates
a non-Stoic doctrine of respect for dignity that avoids these problems. I argue that this doctrine
helps us to understand such moral phenomena as the dignity of nonhuman animals as well as the
core human values of life, freedom, and equality. I end by arguing that Nussbaum underestimates the mutual support between motives of respect and other moral motives such as
compassion.
Key words. Dignity, Compassion, Equality, Freedom, Moral Motivation, Nonhuman
Animals, Respect, Stoicism.
In her recent, widely read article "Compassion and Terror,"1 Martha Nussbaum aims to
defend the moral necessity of compassion against detractors such as the Stoics who would
eliminate compassion as a moral motive. Instead of compassion, the Stoics can be seen as urging
the exclusive reliance on the competing moral motive of respect—in particular, the motive of
respect for human dignity, wherein our dignity is understood to lie in our rational faculties. By
way of rebutting the Stoic view, Nussbaum articulates several problems with the Stoic reliance
on respect, and then argues that compassion does not suffer from these problems; the truly moral
agent, she concludes, must therefore make room for both motives.2
This is an eminently sensible conclusion, and I will not dissent from it in this essay. If
(as I believe) at the most general level the moral life should be understood as one of responding
appropriately to sources of genuine value and disvalue in the world, then one can reach this same
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conclusion by arguing that while dignity is a source of genuine value, to which the appropriate
response is (typically) that of respect, pain and other forms of suffering are sources of genuine
disvalue, to which the appropriate response is (typically) that of compassion. Hence the moral
person will act on some occasions on the motive of compassion, and on some occasions on the
motive of respect (and sometimes on both at once).
Nor will I dissent from Nussbaum's verdict that the Stoic understanding of respect for
dignity suffers from several serious problems. Instead I want to use Nussbaum's incisive
discussion of Stoic respect for dignity as an opportunity to sketch a more flexible, non-Stoic
understanding of this ideal, which I believe can avoid the problems she describes. Indeed, in her
own writings Nussbaum appeals to ideals of dignity;3 clearly, then, she believes there is some
way of thinking about dignity that ought to command our allegiance. This essay seeks to find
such a way, and thus its conclusions are ones that I believe even a staunch defender of
compassion like Nussbaum can endorse. I will, however, argue that Nussbaum errs in one
important regard, namely, in underestimating the large area of convergence that exists between
motives of respect and compassion.
1. The Critique of Stoic Dignity.
The Stoics famously maintained that the only thing of value in the world is virtue, and
virtue consists in living in accordance with "right reason." It is in these powers of rational
agency, they argued, that our unique human dignity lies.4 An important consequence of this
fact, according to the Stoics, is the invulnerability of human dignity. For they insisted that in any
context of choice it is always possible to choose the virtuous option; even a person being tortured
on the rack may still do what virtue requires (say, by "stoically" refusing to divulge information
that will be used to harm innocent people). Indeed, the Stoic philosopher Seneca goes so far as
to argue that the activity of relaxing with friends and the activity of enduring torture with
equanimity are equally valuable activities, since in both cases the agent is choosing properly:
Therefore it follows that joy and a brave unyielding endurance of torture are equal goods;
for in both there is the same greatness of soul, relaxed and cheerful in the one case, in the
other combative and braced for action (Ep. 66.13).
Thus a life composed exclusively of torture would be no less a good life than a more ordinary
virtuous life. The reassuring message of the Stoics, then, was to stress the resiliency of human
dignity. No doubt such reassurance was a large part of Stoicism's appeal.
According to Martha Nussbaum, however, whatever initial appeal Stoicism enjoys
disappears with further scrutiny. She identifies three problems with the Stoic picture of dignity,
which she labels the animal problem, the external goods problem, and the problem of watery
motivation. I will discuss each of these in turn.
First, the animal problem stems from the Stoic identification of human dignity with our
rational capacities. Nussbaum writes:
Reason, language, moral capacity—all these things are seen as worthy of respect and awe
at least in part because the beasts, so called, don't have them, because they make us better
than others. This view has its moral problems, clearly. It has long been used to deny that
we have any obligations of justice toward nonhuman forms of life (p. 18).
One can imagine that in ancient times this would hardly have been judged a problem. But with
the recent growth in moral consciousness regarding the treatment of nonhuman animals, any
view that fails to ground some duties to nonhuman animals risks obsolescence.5
Second, the external goods problem stems directly from the Stoic view about the
invulnerability of human dignity. For if dignity is the only good, and if it can survive all forms
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of misfortune and mistreatment completely intact, then it looks as if humans are invulnerable to
morally significant harm. What, then, is wrong with coercion, theft, lying, and all other sorts of
mistreatment? Since these affect only items external to people's inner mental lives, after all, they
do not harm anything of real value according to the Stoics. We see this problem arise for Seneca
when, in a letter adjuring masters not to beat their slaves or sexually exploit them, he shrinks
from calling for the abolition of the institution of slavery, on the grounds that after all slavery
does not harm slaves, for slaves can still choose virtue. 6 How, though, Nussbaum pointedly
asks, can Seneca consistently leave slavery intact and at the same time condemn the
mistreatment of slaves, since according to Stoics neither slavery nor mistreatment destroys
human dignity (p. 19)? Stoicism, concludes Nussbaum, is unacceptably quietistic; it fails to
recognize that humans need adequate levels of external goods for a life of dignity: among other
things, food, health, shelter, the good will of others, freedom from arbitrary coercion, and so on.
Finally, there is the problem of watery motivation. The term "watery" comes from
Aristotle's criticisms of Plato's plan for exclusively communal family arrangements in his ideal
republic. The absence of strong ties of intimacy between individual parents and their offspring,
Aristotle notes, will lead to a substandard care of children. This is so because the potent care of
a single loving mother and father will be replaced by an inferior, "watery" kind of communal
care (Politics 1262b15). Stoicism, Nussbaum argues, suffers from a similar problem of "watery"
care for others. For it counsels a wholly impartial regard for people’s dignity—an impartial
regard, moreover, that leaves no room for genuine partial attachments to family, friends, and
lovers (p. 21). But can we really imagine humans acting exclusively from impartial motives?
And if we could, would this be desirable? Nussbaum quotes to great effect some extraordinary
passages from Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, in which Marcus,
attempting to resist the appeal of passionate ties to other human beings, "repeatedly casts life as a
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kind of death already, a procession of meaningless occurrences" (p. 22). The Stoic picture of
dignity, then, far from being a powerful source of moral motivation, apparently threatens to
extinguish nearly all human motivation whatsoever.
Having briefly described these three problems for the Stoic doctrine of respect for
dignity, I will now turn to examine whether they are problems that afflict only the rather extreme
Stoic doctrine, or alternatively, whether they are problems for the idea of dignity more generally.
I will endorse the former option and argue that a less extreme doctrine of dignity can avoid each
of the problems.
2. The Animal Problem
In my judgment the animal problem is the most challenging of the three. The challenge
lies not in believing that some nonhuman animals possess a dignity; I find that rather easy to
believe. Instead the challenge lies in articulating precisely the nature of animal dignity; my
remarks in this regard will be somewhat tentative. By way of tackling this challenge, let me
recount a story that one of my colleagues relates about once taking his young son to a circus in
town, and discovering there a lone protestor outside the tent silently holding aloft a sign that read
"REMEMBER THE DIGNITY OF ELEPHANTS." The sign hit him like a lightning bolt, my
colleague said. The protester's point is surely an intelligible one, though we could debate about
whether it is genuinely reason enough to avoid all types of circuses. As a second example, think
about an eagle whose wings have been clipped to keep it in a zoo's cage; it is not unreasonable to
look upon such a creature and feel a keen sense of its loss—even something of a tragic sense of
its loss.
The key to explaining these reactions, I believe, is the sense that elephants and eagles
have some significant powers of agency of their own. It is true that such animals lack the powers
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of rational agency that humans possess, for I presume they cannot consciously formulate
judgments as to which actions they have reason to perform and which actions they have reason to
avoid. However, many nonhuman animals surely are able to have conscious experiences (they
feel pain, have felt needs and wants, etc.)7 and are able to act in a purposive manner (e.g. as
when an animal goes to a river bank to drink), even though they admittedly do not have
conscious thoughts along the lines "I am now doing such-and-such in order to achieve this-andthat." Referring to these abilities as the "powers of purposive agency," my suggestion is that
creatures with these powers possess a type of dignity, even when these powers fall short of truly
rational agency.8
Why should this be the case? This is a hard question to answer, and my thoughts in this
regard are somewhat speculative. Let us use the term "purposive agents" to refer to creatures
that possess powers of purposive agency that fall short of rational agency. My suggestion is that
purposive agents still possess an integrity that rocks and blades of grass and drops of rain and
other natural phenomena lack. Purposive agents like elephants and eagles are still in some
important sense capable of living a life, unlike the other natural items just listed. They are not
merely pushed around by forces wholly external to themselves, devoid of any significant powers
of their own. They are not merely "dust in a wind," to borrow a phrase from the popular 70s
rock tune by that title (an effective metaphor indeed if one wishes, like the band Kansas who
wrote the tune, to puncture our typically exalted view of ourselves). To put the point slightly
differently, it is easy to view an entity that is devoid of significant powers of its own as merely a
bit part of a much larger system, and hence as devoid of a separate integrity of its own. By
contrast, it is much harder to view a conscious creature with powers of its own in this way; the
integrity such creatures possess seems to me to be a plausible source of dignity.
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I want to stress that in my view not just any integrity will suffice for dignity. For
instance, I suppose that a snowflake could be said to possess a type of integrity (compare it to,
say, a snow drift), but in my judgment it is too much of a stretch to speak of the "dignity" of a
snowflake (imagine scolding children who are busy making snowballs for failing to respect the
dignity of individual snowflakes!). Instead I have in mind the integrity that comes with powers
of one's own, and in particular with what I have called the powers of purposive agency (this
latter qualification seems necessary, otherwise we might have to reckon hurricanes to possess
dignity, inasmuch as they possess both a sort of integrity and powers of their own). Perhaps we
can refer to the powerful sort of integrity that grounds dignity as "willful integrity," inasmuch as
non-rational purposive agents can be said to have a "will" of some sort, even if this will is not as
free as (we like to think) ours is.9
We ought to ask, however, whether this view is too restrictive. For is it not possible to
speak intelligibly of, say, giant redwood trees and mountains as possessing dignity, although they
do not possess the powers of purposive agency?10 Americans sing of "purple mountains
majesty" in "God Bless America," for instance; does this not impute a dignity to mountains? In
reply, I would like to think that these cases are the exceptions that prove the rule, so to speak.
For there seem to be two natural ways of explaining our willingness to speak of such entities as
dignified. First of all, it is natural to speak of a mountain "imposing its will" on us, in the sense
of standing as an obstacle potentially blocking our way; we might also speak of a mountainclimber "struggling against" the mountain. The metaphorical reference to a mountain's will—
that is, the metaphorical reference to its agency—makes it natural to speak figuratively of the
mountain's "dignity."
I am not sure this idea is enough on its own, however. If we rely exclusively on this line
of thought to impute dignity to a mountain, we might also be forced, alas, to impute dignity to a
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hurricane, for it can certainly "impose its will" on us. A second line of thought provides the
necessary assistance. For surely it matters that mountains (and some types of trees) endure for
dramatically long periods of time, whereas hurricanes do not. It is easy to view this endurance
metaphorically as an achievement, as the impressively successful execution of a purposive
striving to stay in existence. Consider for instance this passage from “The Bleeding Heart,” a
“prose poem” by Mary Oliver:
I know a bleeding heart plant that has thrived
for sixty years if not more and has never
missed a spring without rising and spreading
itself into a glossy bush, with many small red
hearts dangling. Don’t you think that deserves
a little thought?11
More explicit in its affirmation of respect is the following passage by John Steinbeck:
The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No
one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they
produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It’s not their
unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no,
they are ambassadors from another time. They have the mystery of ferns that
disappeared a million years ago in to the coal of the carboniferous era. They carry their
own light and shade. The vainest, most slap-happy and irreverent of men, in the presence
of redwoods, goes under a spell of wonder and respect. Respect—that’s the word. One
feels the need to bow to unquestioned sovereigns.12
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In short, I contend that attributions of dignity to natural objects draw their strength from the ease
with which we speak of some natural objects as imposing their wills on us, as well as the ease
with which we speak of endurance through the ages as an achievement. If I am right about this,
then even apparent exceptions to the connection between dignity and purposive agency end up
confirming it.
Of course, much more needs saying about nonhuman dignity—in particular, about
precisely what sort of moral duties would be grounded in a respect for this sort of dignity.13 I
must, however, leave such reflections for another occasion; instead I will close this section by
comparing my exploration of animal dignity with a recent discussion of this topic by Nussbaum
herself, in her article “Beyond ‘Compassion and Humanity’: Justice for Nonhuman Animals.”14
Ironically given Nussbaum's praise for the motive of compassion in "Compassion and Terror," in
her article on animal rights she is critical of philosophers such as John Rawls who would ground
our duties to animals in compassion rather than in a concern for justice. In emphasizing the
relevance of a concern for justice has for animal rights, moreover, Nussbaum is quite willing to
speak of animal forms of dignity.
In her article Nussbaum extends her well-known capabilities approach in ethics to the
case of nonhuman animals, persuasively arguing that the flourishing life for a given animal—in
other words, that animal’s good—is defined by reference to the characteristic functionings of that
animal’s species. She recognizes, however, that she must argue for more than just this claim, for
this same claim could also be embraced by Rawlsians who favor a compassion-based approach
to animal welfare rather than a justice-based approach. So Nussbaum must either (i) argue that
any creature with a good is also a creature that is entitled to just treatment, or (ii) argue that only
some subset of creatures with a good are entitled to just treatment. Nussbaum chooses option
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(ii), not wishing to classify all animals as subjects of justice (e.g. there is no injustice involved in
killing a sponge, she says15).
What defines the subset of creatures with entitlements of justice? Nussbaum’s answer is
sentience: “Sentience is not the only thing that matters for basic justice, but it seems plausible to
consider sentience a threshold condition for membership in the community of beings who have
entitlements based on justice.”16 This strikes me as plausible, but also as incomplete in an
important way. For another important goal of Nussbaum’s article is to recommend her
capabilities approach as superior to the utilitarian approach of Peter Singer and others. Toward
this end she is especially critical—and rightly so—of utilitarianism’s monistic focus on a
creature’s pleasure and pain as all that matters, morally speaking. And yet she feels obliged to
introduce sentience as an important threshold in the sphere of justice toward animals by saying
“[a]t the same time, I believe that the capabilities approach should admit the wisdom of
utilitarianism” and regard sentience as the threshold of just concern.17
This represents a missed opportunity, however. The utilitarian, after all, has a ready
answer to the question of why sentience is an important threshold: non-sentient animals do not
experience pleasure or pain. What is Nussbaum’s answer to this question, if not the utilitarian
answer? She does not say. This is a missed opportunity, for the idea of purposive agency is
well-suited to be a non-utilitarian answer to the question of why sentience should matter.
Although I will not argue for this claim here, it is surely plausible to believe that purposive
agency requires sentience; it is hard to think of “unconscious automatons” and “purposive
agents” as anything other than mutually exclusive classes. Hence understanding purposive
agency as a source of dignity, and understanding dignity as grounding entitlements of justice,
would (as Nussbaum wishes) focus attention on sentience as a significant moral threshold,
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without any threat of covert reliance on utilitarian notions. As a result, I believe Nussbaum has
reason to welcome the approach to animal dignity I have defended here.18
3. The External Goods Problem.
This problem, recall, stems from the Stoic claim that neither misfortune nor mistreatment
injures human dignity; it is complete unto itself, in need of no external goods or assistance—in a
word, invulnerable. While attractive in some respects (it is nice to think that a source of such
value in our lives is always secure), we earlier saw that this doctrine has an unacceptable
consequence: if mistreatment and misfortune result in no morally significant harms, what then is
wrong with mistreatment of others or indifference to others' misfortune?
The solution to this problem lies in giving up the doctrine of invulnerable dignity. Far
from maintaining that human dignity is invulnerable to injury, I will argue that there are at least
three distinct forms of injury to human dignity, each of which consists in a failure to show due
respect for such dignity. To make this argument, I must begin by saying more about the grounds
of specifically human dignity.
The Stoics, we have seen, locate human dignity in our powers of rational agency: our
self-consciousness, our capacity to imagine future consequences, to articulate our values, to
deliberate as to which course of action is best, to guide our choices by these deliberations, and so
on. I will not dissent from this part of the Stoic view, but I do want to add a layer of detail to it,
for I believe that this constellation of mental capabilities is especially valuable inasmuch as it
allows adult human beings to cross an important threshold, namely, the threshold that separates
beings who are morally responsible for their actions from beings who are not. The powers of
responsible agency that ordinary human adults possess are such that they are responsible for their
choices in a way that young children, for instance, are not. That is a significant difference, well
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worthy of a deep respect. This fact is acknowledged in the numerous distinctions we draw
between appropriate ways of treating adults and appropriate ways of treating children. “Show me
some respect,” a young adult might say to her elders who persist in treating her as a not-yetresponsible being.
Of course, a number of puzzles accompany the notion of moral responsibility. Where
exactly should we draw the line between beings who are responsible for their actions and beings
who are not? Moreover, insofar as moral responsibility is widely thought to depend on the
existence of a free will, we face the well-known challenge of how free will can exist in a world
of atoms and energy bound by scientific laws. Clearly, it would be foolish of me to attempt to
solve this deep challenge in the short space I have here. Instead I will be content to note that
regardless of the puzzles that abound in the debate over free will, it is hard to deny that there is
surely some difference between adults and children that warrants us treating them differently.
Adult decision making is typically competent in the way a young child’s simply is not. The
capacity for this sort of competent decision making is what I have in mind when I speak of
responsible human agency. The free-will debate, however it turns out, will surely not erase all
morally relevant distinctions between adult and children.
Let us now ask: Supposing the source of human dignity does lie in our capacity for
responsible agency, what does it mean to respect this capacity? The answer to this is threefold:
one respects the capacity for responsible agency by observing a strong presumption against
impairing it, against constraining it, and against ignoring it (that is, against failing to recognize
its existence).19 Each of these ways of failing to respect dignity requires commentary.
First, the most devastating way one can fail to respect another person’s dignity is by
failing to recognize any presumption against impairing that person’s capacity for responsible
agency. In general, one impairs a person’s capacity for responsible agency by crippling the
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mental capabilities necessary for responsible agency or by preventing their healthy development.
Certain forms of abuse, both physical and psychological, can produce this result, especially if the
victim is a child. Quite plausibly, too, a person’s capacity for responsible agency is crippled
while he or she is in the grip of a severe substance addiction. Additionally, one can impair other
people’s capacity for choice by paralyzing them with fear or by incapacitating them with intense
and prolonged pain—and so on.20 In all these cases the implications for dignity are especially
severe. For when a person’s capacity for responsible agency is destroyed, we may say that his or
her dignity is correspondingly diminished.21 Indeed, I believe that past some hard-to-locate
threshold, a severe diminishing of dignity will void the usual moral protections against the taking
of human life. A human being in a permanent vegetative state, lacking all consciousness for
instance, can no longer be said to be living a life in the paradigmatic sense; he or she, we might
say, is merely alive.22 Ending the life of such a being is thus poles apart from ending the life of a
being whose powers of responsible agency are intact.23 In other words, I suggest that in failing to
observe a strong presumption against diminishing other people's dignity, one is in essence failing
to show due respect for morally valuable human life. The ideal of respect for dignity, then, helps
to illuminate the value we attach to human life.
The second way in which one can fail to respect another person’s dignity is by failing to
observe any presumption against constraining the exercise of that person’s capacity for
responsible agency. The clearest case of this lies in physical constraints on a person’s body. At
the extreme, the person is shackled to a dungeon wall, thereby removing nearly all opportunity
for action. A prison cell allows a greater scope of action than a set of shackles but drastically less
scope than exists outside of prison—and so on for other less impairing physical restraints. In the
case of constraint, it is not genuinely apt to say that the constrained person’s dignity is
diminished, for unlike the case of impairment, the person’s capacity for responsible agency will
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remain intact so long as the constraint is not so extreme as to be mentally incapacitating. The
Stoics were right at least to this extent in stressing the resiliency of human dignity. Rather, the
harm of constraint lies in preventing the person from using this capacity in significant ways. This
is a serious harm, for ideally one’s life should reflect one’s dignity, much like the moon reflects
the light of the sun. While constrained, however, a person’s life does not reflect his or her
capacity for responsible agency, as when the moon no longer reflects any light while in the
earth’s shadow during a lunar eclipse. For this reason, it is best not to say the person’s dignity is
diminished, as we did in the previous case of impairment; rather, we should say that the person’s
dignity is obscured.
In addition to physical constraints, there is another important sort of constraint by which
one may obscure another person’s dignity, namely, threat-based constraints. The paradigmatic
instance of this type of constraint is a mugger with a gun in his hand who says, “Your money or
your life.” After complying with his demand, you might later say, “He forced me to hand over
my wallet; I had no choice but to do as he said.” Of course, in a technical sense this is not quite
right: you could have made a dash for it, or tried to tackle the mugger, or defiantly said to him,
“No, you’ll just have to shoot me if you want my money.” From this technical point of view, the
mugger does not constrain you unless and until he does so physically. We should, however, ask
why (contrary to this technical point) it seems so natural to say that you were forced to do as the
mugger said, even if no shot was ever fired. It is natural to say that you were forced to hand over
your money, despite having some choice in a technical sense, because owing to the lethal threat
against your life you had no “real” choice, we might say. Your choice was between handing over
your wallet or putting your life in serious jeopardy; those were your only options. Since all
reasonable people would judge the latter option to be an intolerable one, handing over the money
was surely your only tolerable option. Given this, no one could reasonably hold you responsible
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for the loss of the money; your exercise of responsible agency, while still existent, was certainly
constrained during the mugging. During that time, your dignity was obscured—eclipsed, we
might say, by the dark shadow of the mugger’s deed.24
Just as our discussion of the diminishing of human dignity helped us to understand the
core value we attach to human life, so too this discussion of constraining a person’s exercise of
responsible agency helps us to understand another of our core values, namely, the value of
human freedom. This is so because constraints on people’s exercise of their powers of choice are
in fact constraints on their freedom. It thus follows that respect for a person’s dignity requires
one to respect that person’s freedom.
There is yet more that respect for dignity requires. For in addition to underlying the core
values of human life and freedom, I now will argue that the ideal of respect for human dignity
also underlies the core value of human equality. The key question to ask about the value of
equality is: In what sense are people equal? The answer to this question is hardly obvious; after
all, some people are stronger than others, some are smarter, virtuous, better looking, more
artistic, more personable, and so on. The ideal of respect for human dignity has an answer to this
question, however. Recall the mental prerequisites of responsible agency mentioned earlier: our
self-consciousness, our capacity to imagine future consequences, to articulate our values, to
deliberate as to which course of action is best, to act on our choices, and so on. To be sure,
people differ in each of these mental abilities; some are better than others at imagining future
consequences, or at guiding their choices by their deliberations, etc. Yet once a person’s degree
of these abilities passes a certain threshold, we rightly hold him or her to be capable of
responsible agency. That is to say, all those who pass a basic line of competency share the status
of “responsible being,” even if some are more competent than others. (Compare the class of
responsible beings with the class of pregnant women—all of the women in this class are
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pregnant, even though some are more advanced in their pregnancy than others.) Importantly, this
is not to say all members of this class do in fact make choices we judge to be wise, prudent,
moral, etc.; many do not. Rather, it is to say that members of this class make choices—good or
bad—for which we can properly hold them responsible.
To be sure, this account of human equality does not grant equal status to absolutely every
living being with human DNA. Profoundly retarded individuals and young children do not make
the cut, for instance. This by itself is not an objection to my proposed foundation for moral
equality, however, since to my knowledge no one proposes treating young children or the
profoundly retarded—someone who understands no language of any kind, for instance—exactly
the same as adult humans generally (e.g., by granting them the right to vote). This does not
imply, however, that these human beings have no rights of any kind. Children’s status as
responsible-agents-in-training will give them certain rights. Profoundly retarded people’s status
as bearers of tragic misfortune will morally rule out subjecting them to further indignities
beyond what they already suffer by nature; one should not kick people who are already down.
Beyond these merely suggestive remarks, however, in the short space I have here I will not
address further the difficult question of what rights incompetents possess.25
Returning to the case of human adults who pass the relevant threshold of competency, we
can say that one respects those other people as equall by recognizing in one’s actions the other
people’s status as beings capable of responsible agency. Failing to do this is another failure of
respect for human dignity, to set alongside the other failures of respect described above, namely,
impairing a person’s capacity for responsible agency, or constraining its exercise. One fails to
recognize other people’s status as beings capable of responsible agency when one treats them as
something other than such a being. Consider in this regard the famous formula of Immanuel Kant,
according to which you should “always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the
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person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.”26 To take
one of Kant’s own famous examples, if I borrow some money from another person and make a
lying promise to repay it, with no intention ever to do so, then I am surely not treating the other as
a person in her own right, with her own life to lead and own choices to make; rather I am treating
her as nothing more than, say, an ATM machine with buttons I may push to obtain free money.
So treating others as mere instruments for achieving your personal ends is one way of
failing to recognize others as responsible beings, and thus one way of failing to treat them as
equals. Moreover, treating others as mere instruments is not the only way of failing to treat them
as equals (that is, of failing to treat them as “ends,” to use the Kantian lingo).27 You might for
instance treat them as pieces of refuse to be destroyed or cleared away (as in cases of “ethnic
cleansing”). Or you might treat them paternalistically, as incompetent at making their own
choices—say, by censoring what they read, or by assigning them their occupation, choosing their
spouses for them, etc. Or you might treat them as nothing at all, as nonentities. You would do
this, for instance, if you look upon other people who are suffering impairment of their capacity
for responsible agency, or a constraint on its exercise, and you treat them with indifference
despite being able to help them with only a modest level of effort on your part. Finally, you
might subscribe to a stereotype and view certain other people as beings whose choices are fated
to take a particular form; in this case you are treating others as mere cardboard cutouts of people,
not full-blooded ones. In short (and at the cost of some linguistic infelicity), we can say that
respecting people’s capacity for responsible agency requires that we observe a very strong
presumption against treating people in instrumentalizing, infantilizing, refusizing, nonentitizing,
or stereotyping ways—that is, against treating them as inferiors, rather than as equals who like us
possess powers of responsible agency.
To fail to observe this presumption, we may say, is to insult another person’s dignity, and
17
hence to fail to respect it. Thus we may set insulting other people’s dignity alongside the other
failures of respect previously examined: diminishing other people’s dignity by impairing their
capacity for responsible agency, and obscuring other people’s dignity by constraining their
exercise of this capacity. The relations between the three forms of disrespect and responsible
agency on the one hand, and core moral values on the other hand, are summarized in Table 1
below:
AGENCY EFFECT
DIGNITY EFFECT
VALUE EFFECT
Observing a strong
presumption against
impairing a person's capacity
for responsible agency
= observing a strong presumption
against diminishing that person's
dignity
= showing due
respect for human
life
Observing a strong
presumption against
constraining a person's
exercise of responsible
agency
= observing a strong presumption
against obscuring that person's
dignity
= showing due
respect for human
freedom.
Observing a strong
presumption against ignoring
a person's capacity for
responsible agency
= observing a strong presumption
against insulting that person's
dignity
= showing due
respect for human
equality
Table 1
The Stoics' central mistake, I maintain, lies in failing to acknowledge these distinct forms
of injury to human dignity. An account of dignity that acknowledges these forms of injury thus
can avoid the problem of external goods that renders Stoic doctrine unacceptable.28 In an article
that covers much of the same ground as “Compassion and Terror,” Nussbaum briefly (in a single
paragraph) proposes a two-tiered “Aristotelian” account of dignity to replace the Stoic account.
This two-tiered account distinguishes, first, between innate capacities for rational choice and
developed / trained capacities, and second, between trained capacities and the real opportunity to
18
express these.29 The two distinctions are not explored in detail, and Nussbaum acknowledges
that they “need further development”;30 this section of my paper can be read as an effort at such
development. In fact, Nussbaum’s two distinctions parallel my ideas of diminishing dignity
(this occurs when innate capacities are left undeveloped) and obscuring dignity (this occurs when
opportunities for choice are constrained). Hence I believe my account of dignity (with its
additional third category of threats to dignity—namely, that of insults) is one that Nussbaum
may find congenial.
4. The Problem of Watery Motivation.
Finally, there is the problem of watery motivation. This problem, recall, originates in the
Stoic call for us to extinguish our partial attachments to other people and operate instead from
moral motives of exclusively impartial regard for all persons. According to Nussbaum these
moral motives are likely to be weak and compare unfavorably with motives of compassion
animated by genuine attachments to others.
There are two distinct interpretations of Nussbaum's complaint. The first, more modest
interpretation objects only to Stoicism's totalizing insistence that dignity is the only thing of
intrinsic value in the world, and hence our particular loves and likes are in truth devoid of such
value. We can agree with this complaint, certainly. A world in which humans extinguish all
motives of particularized love for others would not be a desirable world. However, recall that
Nussbaum's explicit aim in her article is that of showing the necessity of motives of compassion
in addition to motives of respect; this aim suggests a second, broader interpretation of
Nussbaum's complaint. According to this second interpretation, the Stoic doctrine of respect for
dignity, while an extreme doctrine, reveals an important truth about motives of respect more
generally, namely, that they are inherently thin, often ineffective, and at odds with erotic/familial
19
attachments—in short, "watery"— and hence in need of help from the motive of compassion,
which is inherently more potent.31
If this is Nussbaum's complaint, then it is unpersuasive. For if this is Nussbaum’s
complaint, then I think she has made the mistake of failing to distinguish between, on the one
hand, the contest between motives of respect and compassion, and on the other hand, the contest
between impartial and partial motives. After all, compassion itself can take an impartial form as
well as partial forms. For instance, utilitarianism (especially in its "ideal spectator" form) can be
read as identifying our moral duties with those actions that would be favored by a compassionate
identification with the happiness of all persons (and perhaps all sentient creatures).
Significantly, the familiar criticisms made of this form of utilitarianism—it is unrealistic; a
purely impartial regard for all will leave no room for more personal relationships of value; and so
on—precisely mirror the criticisms Nussbaum makes of Stoic motives of respect.
The distinction between the compassion/respect debate and the partiality/ impartiality
debate becomes even clearer once we realize that just as compassion can take partial and
impartial forms, so too can respect. Just as I can feel much compassion for the welfare of loved
ones, neighbors, co-nationals, etc. and little for the welfare of others, so too can I be greatly
concerned to respect the dignity of loved ones, neighbors, co-nationals, etc. and yet be unmoved
by the dignity of others.
To illustrate this claim, consider how someone who would not dream of showing utter
contempt for family members may think little of holding many other members of his society in
contempt, especially if these others differ along lines of race, religion, class, etc.. As yet another
example, consider how common it is, even for people who respect their co-nationals as their
equals, to care little whether their actions (say, the purchase of cheap, foreign-made consumer
goods) contribute to the exploitation other people far away; in this context the dignity of those
20
others just does not matter to them. Finally, observe that motives of respect can be partial in yet
another way. For in addition to showing greater respect for one's loved ones, one can also be far
more concerned to combat insults to, and eclipses of, the dignity of oneself and one's loved ones
as opposed to similar shabby treatment of anonymous others. The righteous indignation such
partial concern can generate is far from "watery." Thus the potency of at least some motives of
respect is beyond question.
Hence I suggest that the motivational powers of respect on the one hand, and compassion
on the other hand, compare favorably with each other. It is easier to experience potent forms of
compassion and respect for those close to us, and harder to cultivate these motives in impartial
form. Where is the asymmetry? I cannot see that one of these motives is inherently more
"watery" than the other; compassion for far away others is likely to be as watery as respect for
those same others. And if it is difficult to see how to make motives of enlargened respect
compatible with our particularized loves, it is also difficult to see how to make motives of
enlargened compassion compatible with our particularized loves.
This is not to disparage either motive. Nussbaum is surely right about this: the world
would be much better were there much more of both enlargened compassion and respect.
Conclusion
While the animal problem, the external goods problem, and the problem of watery
motivation are genuine problems for the Stoics' account of respect for dignity, these problems are
artifacts of the extreme nature of this account. The animal problem abates once we recognize
that there is dignity in purposive agency more generally, and not just in rational agency (or
responsible agency) more narrowly. The Stoic claim that human dignity is invulnerable to
external threats reveals itself as false once we recognize that human dignity can be diminished,
21
obscured, and insulted. As for watery motivation, doctrines of respect for dignity that do not
require us to give up all of our partial loves and attachments run no risk of thinning out all
human motivation. Moreover, while the motive of respect for others not near and dear does risk
being a watery sort of motive, the same is true of compassion for others not near and dear. Thus
the problem of watery motivation, to the extent that it is a problem for doctrines of respect for
dignity, is not a special problem for such doctrines. Any doctrine recommending moral regard
for far away persons will face this problem, whether the regard it recommends takes the form of
respect, or whether the regard it recommends takes the form of Nussbaum's educated and
enlarged compassion.
ENDNOTES
1. Daedalus 132:1 (Winter 2003), pp. 10-26. Further references to page numbers in this
article will be given parenthetically. This article was also published with minor revisions in
James P. Sterba, ed. Terrorism and International Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003), pp. 229-252.
2. The connection with terror—as suggested by the article's title "Compassion and
Terror"—comes with Nussbaum's discussion of the horrors of September 11, in which she argues
that the proper response to these horrors requires a deeper understanding of the plight of others
around the globe, an understanding generated by an enlarged and educated compassion for such
others. Interesting though this claim is I will not focus on it in this article.
3. See for instance Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000).
22
4. See for instance Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers 7.87-89, p. 395 in A. A.
Long and David Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987); Stobaeus, Eclogae 2.75[11ff.] (reporting the view of Zeno of Citium, Stoicism’s founder)
and 2.76[9-15], both passages in Long and Sedley (pp. 394 and 357 respectively); Seneca,
Epistles 41.8-9, 66.40, 76.9-17, 92.11-13, and 124 passim. (In Seneca, Moral Epistles, 3 vols.,
trans. R. M. Gummere [Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1917-25]).
5. In addition to the animal problem, Stoic dignity faces another related problem
inasmuch as it appears to deny that we have any obligations of justice toward non-rational forms
of life; the category of the non-rational, after all, is broader than that of the nonhuman, for human
infants are not yet rational beings, and many profoundly mentally retarded humans never will be
rational beings. How, then, can the Stoics account for the wrongness of the abuse or killing of
these humans? This is a challenging problem that deserves a full discussion, but beyond a few
suggestive remarks in the section below titled “The External Goods Problem” I will not discuss
this problem in the present essay. (Were I to discuss the question of infanticide in more detail I
would by and large follow the approach taken in Richard Norman, “The Wrongness of Killing,”
Chapter 2 of his Ethics, Killing and War [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995].)
6. Ep. 47.17. Noting an individual’s status as a slave, Seneca asks “Will this do him any
harm?” Here I follow Nussbaum’s translation of Hoc illi nocebit? (p. 19) rather than Gummere’s
translation “But shall that stand in his way?” in the Loeb classical edition. C. D. N. Costa’s
recent translation of Letter 47 parallels Nussbaum’s: “Must this be damaging to him?” (Seneca,
17 Letters, C. D. N. Costa, trans. [Warminster, U. K.: Aris and Phillips Ltd., 1988], p. 33).
23
7. For a state-of-the-art look at the issue of animal consciousness see Colin Allen,
"Animal Pain," Noûs 38:617-43 (2004).
8. My claim, then, is that where one finds purposive agency one also finds dignity. I
regard this as a normative claim rather than a meta-ethical claim, i.e. in saying this I do not
purport to be defining the concept of dignity. One possible definition is due to Stephen Darwall,
who defines dignity as “[a] moral status or standing that is the appropriate object of (recognition)
respect” (Stephen Darwall, Philosophical Ethics [Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998], p. 234;
for Darwall’s account of recognition respect, see his “Two Kinds of Respect,” Ethics 88:1
[1977], pp. 36-49). This seems along the right lines, though I worry it is overbroad—e.g. Andy
Warhol’s famous soup can paintings probably merit respectful treatment (one shouldn’t burn
them as campfire fuel, for instance), but do they really possess a dignity? To fix this problem I
am tempted to build in the idea of integrity (to be discussed above shortly): to say an entity
possesses dignity on this account would be to say it possesses an integrity that is the appropriate
object of (recognition) respect. I will not defend this definition further in the present paper,
however.
9. The connection I am positing between power on the one hand (in particular, the power
of purposive agency) and dignity on the other should not really be surprising, I think. Not so
long ago, after all, only those people who had significant power over others were believed to
possess dignity. (Indeed, this substratum of meaning still persists in our use of the term
"dignitaries" to refer to individuals in positions of power.) Nowadays doctrines of equal human
dignity are more likely to hold sway; these doctrines sever the connection between dignity and
power-over-others, finding instead the locus of morally valuable power to lie within each human
individual. It is hence unsurprising that a further expansion of the "circle of dignity," so to
24
speak, to include nonhuman animals should retain a connection with power of some sort. For
some further brief speculations on the connections between dignity and power, see Joel Feinberg,
"Some Conjectures About the Concept of Respect," Journal of Social Philosophy 4:1-3 (1973).
10. It is true that a tree's growth is sometimes susceptible to teleological explanation (e.g.
when it grows toward the sun). Surely, though, this is not enough to qualify it as a purposive
agent, otherwise a refrigerator, say, would likewise qualify since its "behavior" too can be
described in teleological terms ("it began its cooling cycle in order to bring the temperature back
to the level of the thermostat"). Even if this counterexample could be avoided on the grounds,
say, that refrigerators are human-made artifacts, other counterexamples threaten. For all I know,
for instance, the "behavior" of mold can be teleologically explained, but pace "biocentric
egalitarians" like Paul Taylor, mold surely does not thereby possess a dignity deserving of
respect. (See Paul W. Taylor, Respect for Nature [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press].)
11. Mary Oliver, Blue Iris: Poems and Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), p. 17
12. John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley (New York: The Viking Press, 1961), pp. 16869 (emphasis added); quoted in Paul Woodruff, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 222. It is worth noting that we can speak of
reverence for nature as well as respect for nature. Woodruff defines reverence thusly:
“Reverence is the well-developed capacity to have the feelings of awe, respect, and shame when
these are the right feelings to have” (p. 8). In Woodruff’s view, then, reverence is a broader
phenomenon than respect (cf. pp. 9, 65-66), inasmuch as it encompasses shame and awe as well .
Indeed, after reflecting on the cases of mountains and trees just discussed, one may wonder
whether the feelings in question are better described as feelings of awe at these objects’ presence
rather than feelings of respect for a dignity they possess. In this paper I will remain agnostic on
25
the question; my aim instead has been the more modest one of arguing that if on further
reflection we wish to impute dignity to some non-living things, this is not a fatal objection to my
account of dignity in terms of purposive agency.
13. For a good start on this issue, see Elizabeth S. Anderson, "Animal Rights and the
Values of Nonhuman Life," pp. 277-98 in Cass Sunstein and Martha Nussbaum, Animal Rights:
Current Debates and New Directions (Oxford University Press, 2004).
14. Pages 299-320 in Sunstein and Nussbaum, Animal Rights.
15. Ibid., p. 309. Since there is such a thing as the characteristic functioning of a sponge,
I presume Nussbaum’s capability approach would license talk of a sponge’s good. Hence I
interpret her as rejecting option (i).
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Some of Nussbaum’s phrasing suggests she may already accept such an approach.
E.g. early on in her article she states that “I believe that thinking of animals as active beings who
have a good and who are entitled to pursue it naturally leads us to see important damages done to
them as unjust” (ibid., p. 302; my emphasis), and she stress that the capabilities approach treats
animals “as agents seeking a flourishing existence” (ibid.; my emphasis). However, she does not
return to this idea when invoking sentience to define which animals exactly are subjects of
justice. I believe the idea of agency should be foregrounded as a more central element of her
account. (Perhaps Nussbaum might resist this suggestion on the grounds that it risks being
unacceptably monistic and hence at odds with her pluralistic capabilities approach. I would
dispute this. To treat purposive agency as of central moral importance is not to say it is the only
26
item of moral importance. Nussbaum herself, in her book Women and Human Development:
The Capabilities Approach [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000] argues that in
the human case we can treat practical reason as central in importance, without reducing the other
capabilities’ value to a merely instrumental kind [p. 82]. Cf. her claim in an earlier article that
“[p]ractical reasoning is both ubiquitous and architectonic. It both infuses all the other functions
and plans for their realization in a good and complete [human] life.” [Martha Nussbaum,
“Aristotelian Social Democracy,” in R. Bruce Douglas, et. al., eds. Liberalism and the Good
(London: Routledge, 1990), p. 226].)
19. I speak of observing a strong presumption against impairing, constraining, and
ignoring the capacity for responsible agency, rather than an absolute prohibition against these,
because the theory I would defend is not an absolutist theory. We may face tragic choices in
which, say, all of our options leave some person’s dignity injured, so that the best we can do is
minimize rather than avoid such injuries.
20. Even Seneca seems to acknowledge this when he writes, "What element of evil is
there in torture and in the other things which we call hardships? It seems to me there is this
evil—that the mind sags, bends, and collapses" (Ep. 71.26). It is true that he continues by
saying, "But none of these things can happen to the sage; he stands erect under any load"—thus
attempting to preserve the claim that human dignity in principle can withstand such misfortunes.
However, in another letter Seneca notes the rarity of the true Stoic sage: "one of the first class
perhaps springs into existence, like the phoenix, only once in five hundred years" (Ep. 42.1).
The life of the sage, we may surmise, is more an impossible ideal that one should aspire to
approximate than a strict mode of conduct that one should live by.
27
21. It is not necessarily destroyed altogether, for as I observed in the previous section,
there may be other forms of dignity besides the characteristic human sort located in the capacity
for responsible agency.
22. Here I rely on James Rachels's distinction between "being alive" and "having a life."
For further discussion, see his The End of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
23. This is not to suggest that there are no moral complexities involved in questions of
euthanasia.
24. For brevity’s sake, in this paragraph I have passed over some complexities. Harry
Frankfurt, for instance, would view handing the money to the mugger not as a coerced choice but
rather as a choice made under duress (see Harry Frankfurt, “Coercion and Moral Responsibility,”
in his The Importance of What We Care About [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988],
pp. 36-37). For my purposes what matters is that regardless of whether one chooses under duress
or coercion, one’s menu choices is radically truncated by the mugger’s action.
25. Note that Martha Nussbaum is a prominent voice in discussions of the moral
treatment owed to the disabled. See for instance her forthcoming Frontiers of Justice
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006).
26. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New
York: Harper and Row, 1964), 96.
27. For a sophisticated discussion of the Kantian formula, which likewise judges that
Kant's command to treat others as ends possesses moral content above and beyond the content
that is expressed in his command not to treat others as mere means, see Thomas E. Hill, Jr.
"Humanity as an End in Itself," Ethics 91:84-99 (1980).
28
28. For further exploration of these distinctions, and in particular what consequences they
have for political relations between individuals, see [identifying reference omitted]..
29. Martha C. Nussbaum, “The Worth of Human Dignity: Two Tensions in Stoic
Cosmopolitanism,” in Gillian Clark and Tessa Rajak, eds. Philosophy and Power in the GraecoRoman World: Essays in Honour of Miriam Griffian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002),
p. 46.
30. Ibid., p. 47
31. For example, after rejecting Marcus’s Stoic account of respect, Nussbaum asks,
“Where are we then? It looks as if we are back where Aristotle and Adam Smith leave us: with
the unreliability of compassion, and yet the need to rely on it, since we have no more perfect
motive” (p. 23). Thus Nussbaum apparently understands the problems with Stoic ideals of
respect to be problems with ideals of respect more generally. (This does not mean that
Nussbaum rejects motives of respect, however, for she immediately adds that “[t]his does not
mean that we need give up on the idea of equal human dignity, or respect for it”; she then goes
on to make it clear that in her view we are to respond to respect’s deficiencies not by jettisoning
all motives of respect, but rather by supplementing these motives with motives of compassion.)
29