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 under-estimates 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 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 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 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-and-that." 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.

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 mountain-climber "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."