Dignity, Hate and Harm

• Author: Peter Jones
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591715595617
• Published date: 01 October 2015
• Date: 01 October 2015

595617PTXXXX10.1177/0090591715595617Political TheoryReview Essay
research-article2015
Review Essay
Political Theory
2015, Vol. 43(5) 678 –686
Dignity, Hate and Harm
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Dignity, Rank, and Rights, by Jeremy Waldron. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012.
The Harm in Hate Speech, by Jeremy Waldron. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2012.
Reviewed by: Peter Jones, Newcastle University
DOI: 10.1177/0090591715595617
The dignity commonly claimed for human beings is often dismissed as pious
rhetoric. Jeremy Waldron is one of a number of philosophers who have
recently argued that dignity is, on the contrary, an idea we should take seriously.1
It was the subject of the Tanner Lectures that he delivered in 2009, which are
published in Dignity, Rank, and Rights, together with comments on his lec-
tures by Michael Rosen, a political philosopher; Don Herzog, a legal scholar;
and Wai Chee Dimock, a literary scholar. The volume concludes with
Waldron’s Reply. Dignity also figures prominently in The Harm in Hate
Speech, since, for Waldron, the harm of hate speech consists principally in its
assaulting and undermining the dignity of its victims.
Waldron conceives dignity as a principle of both morality and law.
Philosophical discussions generally give primacy to dignity as a moral idea,
albeit one that should inform the character and content of legal systems,
domestic and international. Waldron reverses that order of priority and gives
primacy to dignity as a legal concept. Law, he believes, is the “natural habi-
tat” of dignity (13). Just as we do best to analyse the concept of rights as a
legal idea before turning to examine how rights have come to figure in our
moral thinking, so we do best to understand dignity as, in the first instance, a
legal idea and one whose moral use and significance is parasitic upon its legal
origins. Waldron’s opting to understand dignity through the medium of law
also seems to owe something to the unsympathetic treatment—the “destruc-
tive analytic critique” (16)—that dignity has frequently suffered at the hands
of moral philosophers.
He goes along with the widespread supposition that there is a close asso-
ciation between human dignity and human rights. Dignity is often invoked as
a general ground of human rights and also figures in the content of some

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rights, such as rights not to be subjected to degrading treatment. But, he sug-
gests, the relationship between dignity and rights is not simple: not all human
rights have a content that relates immediately to dignity, and dignity does not
provide the telos of human rights. Dignity describes, first and foremost, a
status and, as a status, it comprises a set of rights; it is not a condition to
which rights relate as instruments. However, Waldron’s remarks on the rela-
tionship between dignity and rights do not get much beyond the suggestive;
he is more concerned to focus upon the idea of dignity itself.
His conception of dignity as connoting status or rank leads him to distance
his thinking from that commonly ascribed to Kant. The Würde of Kant’s
Groundwork, the possession of “value beyond price,” which is usually trans-
lated as “dignity,” would he argues be better rendered as “worth.” He does
not mean to reject Kant’s idea of human worth; his claim is only that it should
not be conflated with dignity. Even if we were to make human worth the
foundation of human dignity, worth and dignity would remain distinct ideas.
For the same reason and in the same way, he rejects the Roman Catholic
equation of dignity with the absolute worth of human life. He does, however,
find evidence of dignity properly understood in the traditional Catholic teach-
ing that, in the great chain of being, angels rank above humans, humans
above beasts, and beasts above plants, and that all are inferior in dignity, that
is, in rank, to God.
Waldron’s own account of dignity is governed by his belief that we should
keep faith with its historical meaning, particularly its historical connection
with noble rank and high office. He instances the Roman usage of dignitas,
which described the honour, privilege and deference due to rank or office; the
dignity ascribed to kings and queens; the dignity enjoyed by the nobility and
the different degrees of dignity that attached to different sorts of noble; and
the dignity still deemed appropriate to office-holders such as judges, bishops
and ambassadors.
That may seem an unlikely foundation for understanding the contempo-
rary notion of human dignity with its rejection of fundamental differences in
status and its association with rights possessed equally by all. However, for
Waldron, human dignity is not merely an egalitarian idea; it is also an idea of
“high rank”—the high rank of all human beings. Rather than abandoning the
high status that was once the preserve of monarchs and aristocrats, the idea of
human dignity has assigned that high status to all. Dignity has become “nobil-
ity for the common man” (22). Waldron describes this transformation as a
“transvaluation,” in which the historical association of dignity with noble
birth and high office has been reworked and reassigned rather than merely
superseded. There has been a “levelling-up” of the bearers of dignity. So, for
example,...