Milan Andrejevic

Appeals to the value of treating people with dignity are commonplace in certain community settings, especially in health, disability, and aged care. In contrast, dignity has been relatively neglected by philosophers, not receiving the careful scrutiny most other moral concepts have been afforded. This has recently changed, with a spate of new philosophical books and articles about the meaning and value of dignity. No consensus has emerged about what dignity means or about how it is distinct from other moral values. Here, we seek to advance the debate by integrating philosophical theory with findings from empirical studies.Specifically, we argue that when people appeal to dignity in community settings they are most likely appealing to the value of not humiliating people, where to humiliate another is to treat them as a social inferior. We review two previous empirical studies which we conducted to test how lay people understand dignity. By considering these two studies together and integrating our findings with philosophical debate about the meaning of dignity, we show in this paper that lay people indeed understand dignity in line with the view that dignity means treating others as our social equals.

Dignity is prominently endorsed in healthcare, organizations, and law. However, humanities research casts doubt over the utility of this concept, disputing that “dignity” captures any unique ethical value distinguishable from “respect”. Here, we test a recent proposal that dignity entails special regard for humiliation. We created a set of vignettes describing a ‘perpetrator’ making offensive remarks or gestures to a ‘victim’, and asked lay participants to rate how well each offense corresponds to a dignity violation as opposed to a respect violation. We manipulated the victims’ resulting emotions within-subject, across ‘humiliation’, ‘anger’, and ‘baseline’ conditions, while controlling for other factors (e.g. victim’s gender, vulnerability). We found substantial evidence (BF=4.11) for our preregistered hypothesis that humiliation increased dignity-relatedness ratings as compared to the baseline condition, and very strong evidence when compared to the anger condition (BF=84.75). These findings provide empirical backing to dignitarian ethics with applications in healthcare, organizations, and law.