Narrow view of the basis of dignity

Kant fails to capture all that is intrinsically valuable in human beings and makes them worthy of treatment that is respectful and helpful. According to Kant, the ground of dignity is rational agency, including the capacity to set ends and, especially, the capacity for autonomous reasoning about what is morally right (G, 4: 428–9, 434–6; KpV, 5: 87–8; MS, 6: 434–5, 442–4). But we should be more sensitive and adopt a broader view. Certain capacities for practical reasoning falling short of moral reasoning are significant in their own right. And the same is the case with sentience. We rightly pay attention to them, for example, when considering how healthcare practitioners should treat patients with severe cognitive impairments. Medical treatment here could not go very far in terms of recruiting patients’ rational endorsement, but should still respond to any level of agency that is present and be directly concerned with limiting their misery and facilitating pleasant experiences. Furthermore, a broader view is intuitively more plausible because it would enable recognition of the dignity of non-human animals and the direct duties owed to them. It is implausible to uniformly lump together every entity that is not a ‘person’ with moral agency into the ontological heap of ‘things’.Footnote ¹³

Insufficient recognition of the importance of well-being

As Kant says, we must respect persons’ freedom. But norms to foster their well-being are important as well, even if they must be constrained by (or at least weighted against) norms not to hamper their freedom. Kant’s use of the phrase ‘dignity’ is however tied to duties of respect for freedom, and not explicitly linked to concern regarding well-being.

Now, duties of concern regarding people’s well-being can (and I think should) be seen as part of what dignitarian norms include. A direct concern for well-being is already involved in Kant’s recognition of the positive dimension of the Formula of HumanityFootnote ¹⁴ and in his defence of duties of beneficence, which precisely focus on furthering other agents’ happiness (MS, 6: 385, 393–4, 452ff.). Additionally, Kant’s conception of the ‘highest good’, the ultimate object of morality, includes both happiness and virtue. This conception may be interpreted as saying that (a) well-being is significant as an ethical aim even though (b) it is constrained by another significant aim that has strict priority – achieving moral virtue.Footnote ¹⁵

Even if we accept Kant’s critique of paternalism in politics, we do not thereby have to dismiss the importance of happiness for political choice. When we make an autonomous collective choice, we must ask ourselves which amongst the available set of options is best. A natural way to proceed – I do not say the only one – is to choose the set that will make us happier – insofar as no injustice is thereby generated. Regarding persons as ends in themselves includes taking their happiness as significant.Footnote ¹⁶

Why should well-being matter within a dignitarian framework? My hypothesis is that well-being (at least in part) coincides with the development and exercise of the capacities that give rise to human dignity. Whether we adopt an objectivist, desire-satisfaction or hedonistic view of well-being (or some combination thereof), states of well-being are likely to feature in the conditions protected and promoted by the fulfilment of dignitarian norms. On an objectivist account (which I favour), well-being involves access to intrinsic goods, which could include the development and exercise of various valuable human capacities. Success in this development and exercise could involve the satisfaction of informed desires of the kind desire-satisfaction theories centre on. And, finally, the enjoyment that comes with these developments and exercises of capacities is of the kind a hedonistic theory might praise (and might, additionally, be highlighted by an objectivist theory that takes pleasure as one of the items in its list of goods – perhaps because of the value of the capacity of sentience or because enjoyment is constitutive of what it is to develop and exercise capacities well).

So, by adding a more explicit and positive focus on supporting people’s pursuit of their well-being to the respect and promotion of their freedom we do not only complement what Kant explicitly says about the targets of moral action and institutions. We also develop the dignitarian framework by showing how it generates concern for well-being as a dimension of appropriate responses to status-dignity. Well-being is part and parcel of dignitarian morality, not a concession it grudgingly makes to objectors. An important corollary for a theory of rights is that there is no insurmountable gap in moving from interests in well-being to rights to access it when the former concern the development and exercise of the capacities in the basis of dignity which ground the deontic space of rights itself. The capacities at the basis of dignity bridge the gap by simultaneously grounding interests in, and rights to, their development and exercise.

Now, if we accept this broader dignitarian outlook, we must see social, legal and political philosophy as asking what, if anything, might justify the coercive imposition of constraints on people’s choices regarding external action, but also how people’s well-being might justifiably be fostered. A theory of justice can, pace one of Kant’s observations, focus on needs besides choices (MS, 6: 230). Thus, I suggest that we interpret the Social Contract Standard as allowing us to draw on shareable reasons of well-being when assessing alternative social institutions, laws and policies. We do not need to rely only on the normative idea of being one’s own master and avoiding submission to the will of others (MS, 6: 238). In fact, we need to appeal to something else if we are to figure out what to choose (together) as the appropriate terms of our social life.Footnote ¹⁷ And notions of well-being linked to the development and exercise of capacities that give rise to human dignity fit the bill quite nicely. Kant already draws on considerations of this kind in his ethical doctrine. Saving the differences, it could also be done at the level of the doctrine of right. Or so a full development of the dignitarian approach that includes the ideal of solidaristic empowerment would, in my opinion, require.

Limits of independence

Kant affirms an idea of independence. He often construes it as self-determination, championing agents’ ability to determine themselves to act on the basis of what their own prudential and moral reasoning recommends rather than on the basis of unchecked inclinations (KpV, 5: 117–19, 152, 269), or the opinions and dictates of others (MS, 6: 237–8). The political expression is active citizenshipFootnote ¹⁸ and the rejection of paternalistic despotism.Footnote ¹⁹ In other cases, Kant links independence with the idea of self-reliance, of not depending on others for the satisfaction of one’s needs (except as a member of a state) (G, 4: 434; TP, 8: 294–6; MS, 6: 237–8, 314–15). This leads Kant to a qualified characterization of beneficence. The worry is that beneficence may be ‘humiliating’ to the people helped (MS, 6: 448–9, 453). It is preferable that the rich help the poor anonymously, without humbling them or making them feel that they are put under obligation. Sometimes people fail to show gratitude because they fear this would signal their dependence on those who help them, and thus their inequality and perhaps lack of dignity (MS, 6: 459).

Kant is right to praise independence as self-determination. In recognizing this independence, we can indeed ‘feel [our] own dignity’ (KpV, 5: 152). Kant is also correct to challenge paternalism, and to spot the significant interaction between conditions of economic dependence and lack of active self-determination. I am less sure that we should accept his tendency to also affirm independence as self-reliance. Self-reliance seems infeasible given our causal dependence on others to achieve most of what we value. And it seems undesirable to construe help as giving rise to humiliation, both because this would deter people from helping each other and thus from getting benefits they need, and because the practices of help could be in themselves valuable instances of telic treatment of persons. As socialists and feminists have argued after Kant, human beings are inescapably interdependent. To manage that interdependence properly, they should recognize solidarity as essential for achieving just social relations. The Kantian ideal of a realm of ends should include a combination of self-determination and solidarity in both interpersonal and institutional settings.

Perhaps these points can be reconciled through Kant’s caveat that economic reliance on others is not a problem if the relation is under the framework of equal citizenship (where the poor are helped as citizens through public services based on general taxation by the government rather than as private persons assisted by other private persons). But even at the political level, citizens will have different amounts of actual power to affect governmental decision-making (some may be more charismatic, or more intelligent, or more knowledgeable, or part of the majority, etc.). Although we should aim at equal empowerment in politics, factual inequalities will remain. A morality of solidaristic use of unequal power seems necessary.Footnote ²⁰

A further point cuts deeper to show the limits of Kant’s idea of independence as self-determination. If we only see the contours of a just society as constituted by the constraint that it should prevent dependence as the subjection to the choice of others, then we will not be fully able to respond to the value of people’s capacities giving rise to their status-dignity. Two societies might be constructible in which nobody subjects others to their will. But one may feature more opportunities, equally distributed, for all to achieve higher levels of development and exercise of their valuable capacities. A political conception singly based in independence (such as Ripstein’s Reference Ripstein2009) cannot explain why the first is preferable. A wider notion of empowerment is needed. This idea focuses on abilities to flourish in various ways, and is a fitting target for solidaristic action and institutions. This is the kind of thought that socialists have come to add since the nineteenth century to the liberal concern with non-domination and formal equality of opportunity. A dignitarian framework can capture this move, but at the (reasonable) cost of going beyond the narrow construal of freedom as independence. This point works in cooperation with the call for more attention to the importance of well-being. And it can mobilize other resources in Kant’s work, such as his postulate concerning property rights – stating that access to material resources is necessary for effective freedom (MS, 6: 230) – as a step in an argument calling for greater empowerment to develop and exercise one’s valuable human capacities. We are already in socialist territory.

Exploitation

In the technical Marxian sense, the exploitation of workers consists in the extraction of their surplus labour (the part of their work that goes beyond securing their own reproduction as workers). Class societies involve exploitation. The immediate producers, the workers, engage in both necessary and surplus labour. The latter (or its product) is appropriated by the members of the dominant classes. Masters exploit slaves, lords exploit serfs and capitalists exploit waged workers.Footnote ²³ Now, in ordinary language, ‘exploitation’ has a normative connotation. One common rendering is that it consists in taking unfair advantage of others. The exploitation of workers involves a morally problematic transfer of valuable resources (such as the product of surplus labour) from them to their exploiters. But what renders the transfer morally problematic? On the account that I favour, exploitation is a form of wrongful use of superior power (Goodin Reference Goodin1987). It involves taking advantage of others who are weaker by getting them to give you more than they should.

Capitalists exploit workers by using their superior bargaining power (resulting from their private control of the means of production) to extract from them more than they might (and ought to) give if they were not so vulnerable. The Kantian dignitarian account explains what’s wrong with this. One of the most evident ways in which capitalism is an affront to dignitarian ideals is that it enshrines instrumental treatment of others as a typical aspect of production and exchange. As the competitive economic agents that they are, capitalists seek profit, and show concern for the freedom and well-being of their workers only if, and to the extent that, doing so would add to their profit margin. Workers have price, not dignity, for them. This has a systemic dimension as well, as capitalists normally throw their significant weight behind political agents and processes that sustain institutional schemes that cement their privileged position by making capitalist relations of production the law of the land. Capitalist exploitation is a social pattern of reduction of some human beings to mere instruments for the self-regarding benefit of others.

Domination

It could be objected that capitalist exploitation involves no dignitarian injustice because workers freely consent to the terms on which they interact with capitalists. They are not, like slaves, dragged to the factory or the office against their will. They sign contracts. But this objection ignores that the exploitation of workers happens in tandem with their domination. Consent that is given in circumstances of profound vulnerability and power asymmetry does not authorize its outcomes.

For consider, how is it that workers acquiesce to their exploitation? How come they enter contracts in which they produce and give away objects with more value than is expressed in their wages? Is it because they want to altruistically sacrifice their own well-being to make sure that the capitalists live in luxury? According to Marx, two conditions help explain workers’ choice to enter a contract of exploitation: (1) workers in capitalism (unlike in feudalism or slave societies) own their labour power, but (2) they do not own means of production. Given their dispossession (2), workers have no reasonable alternative to using their entitlement (1) to sell their labour power to the capitalists – who do own the means of production.Footnote ²⁴ Because of the deep background inequality of power resulting from their structural position in a capitalist economy, workers accept a pattern of economic transaction in which they submit to the direction of capitalists during the activities of production and surrender a disproportional part of their fruits.

Again, Kant helps us understand what’s wrong here. He deploys the radical idea of a human beings’ ‘innate equality, that is, independence from being bound by others to more than one can in turn bind them; hence a human being’s quality of being his own master’ (MS, 6: 237–8). This idea has important consequences for the assessment of relations of production in capitalism, as these involve domination and the dependence of workers on the discretion of capitalists’ choices at three critical junctures. The first is the one we have already considered, which concerns the labour contract. Due to their lack of control of means of production, workers must largely submit, on pain of starvation, to the terms capitalists offer them. The second concerns the day to day interactions in the workplace. Capitalists and their managers rule the activities of workers by unilaterally deciding what the workers produce and how they produce it. Although in the sphere of circulation workers and capitalists might look (misleadingly, given the first point) like equally free contractors striking fair deals, once we enter the ‘hidden abode’ of production it is clear to all sides that what exists is relationships of intense subjection of some to the will of others (Marx Reference Marx1990: 279–80). Workers effectively spend most of their waking hours doing what others dictate them to do. Third, and finally, capitalists have a disproportionate impact on the legal and political process shaping the institutional structure of the society in which they exploit workers – such as the contours of property and labour law. Even if workers manage to obtain the legal right to vote and create their own trade unions and parties (which labour movements have eventually achieved after much struggle), capitalists exert disproportionate influence via greater access to mass media, the funding of political parties, the threat of disinvestment and capital flight, and the past and prospective recruitment of state officials in lucrative jobs in their firms and lobbying agencies. At the spheres of exchange, production and in the broader political process, workers are subject to the will of capitalists in the shaping of the terms on which they work. This is an affront to their dignity as self-determining, self-mastering agents.Footnote ²⁵

Alienation

The socialist critique of capitalism as a system of social relationships is complex. It also focuses on alienation.Footnote ²⁶ This critical point can also be fruitfully articulated in dignitarian terms.

Marx uses the term ‘alienation’ to cover several phenomena.Footnote ²⁷ Subjectively, alienation can appear as a sense of lack of meaning or worth in one’s life. But for Marx, alienation has an objective aspect. People may be alienated even if they do not feel alienated. The key is the mismatch between people’s existence – the way they actually live their lives – and their essence. Alienation occurs when the former fails to appropriately express the latter. More specifically, in Marx’s view, people are alienated when they do not develop and exercise their human capacities. Marx concentrates on those aspects of human nature relevant for productive activity, such as the capacities for freely chosen and creative work, which is undertaken in cooperative ways, and which meets the needs of others.Footnote ²⁸ Workers are alienated to the extent that their ability to develop and exercise these valuable capacities at work is limited.Footnote ²⁹ If, as seems plausible, these remarkable capacities are in the basis of dignity, then we can say that dignitarian norms are violated when workers are avoidably cornered in capitalism into work that is repetitive, stunting, toxically competitive or that engages little initiative and decision-making.

When Kant discusses happiness, and the imperatives linked to its pursuit, he says that our inquiries would have to focus on figuring out empirically what causes happiness and then (conclude that we should) go for it.Footnote ³⁰ But this ignores that there is a substantive, non-analytic but also not merely empirical or descriptive task of identifying certain ends in life as good, or as being constitutive of the agent’s well-being. Marx’s discussion of non-alienation and self-realization can be used to fill some of this gap.Footnote ³¹ The Marxian view of self-realization says that people add to their well-being when they succeed at engaging in the free development and exercise of their human capacities in solidaristic cooperation with others. This view provides a partial account of the good worth plugging into our moral framework as part of the metric of advantage informing dignitarian norms.Footnote ³² What we, individually or through our institutions, should not prevent others from accessing, or should enable others to access includes, inter alia, practices in which they can develop and exercise their capacities so as to achieve self-realization. These ideas inform Marx’s characterizations of a socialist society. Self-realization would occur once the ‘realm of necessity’ and the corresponding necessary labour to secure subsistence is circumscribed and people reach also a ‘realm of freedom’ in which ‘the development of human energy which is an end in itself’ unfolds (Marx Reference Marx1991: 957–9). This realm of freedom would involve non-alienated labour. In fact, such labour, enabling the ‘all-round development of the individual’, would become their ‘prime want’.Footnote ³³ Socialists call for a human emancipation featuring ‘the development of the rich individuality which is all-sided in its production as in its consumption’Footnote ³⁴ and envision a ‘higher form of society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle’ (Marx Reference Marx1990: 739).

The Abilities/Needs Principle

Marx never provided a detailed account of what a socialist society would be like. In fact, he was hostile to advancing blueprints, dismissing this as a form of paternalism (see (ii) below). It is obvious that such a society would involve a shift to the socialist aspects of organization mentioned in the contrasts stated at the start of section 3: the bulk of the means of production would be socially owned and controlled, production would primarily be aimed at need satisfaction, and the division between bourgeoisie and proletariat would disappear. These points are consistent with different specific institutional frameworks. Indeed, there is a lively contemporary debate showing that a centrally planned economy is far from the only option – for example, market socialism, the expansion of co-operatives and the extension of democratic principles to the economy offer alternatives (Wright Reference Wright2010). Given space constraints, I concentrate here on a key idea by Marx, which is that socialist organization would instantiate the slogan ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’ (the Abilities/Needs Principle).Footnote ³⁵

The Abilities/Needs Principle can be understood as an elaboration of the dignitarian idea of solidaristic empowerment. As I argue elsewhere (Reference Gilabert2015: 207–8), we can develop it in terms of the following demands:

1. (a) Opportunities for self-realization in work: There should be effective opportunities for productive activity involving self-realization rather than alienation. The available activities would foster the development and exercise of workers’ productive capacities, give them powers of management and enable them to cooperate. These opportunities would be effective in that mechanisms would be in place to offset morally arbitrary differences between workers that affect their accessibility. For example, excellent education would be available to all, and the workplace would be designed so that workers with different talents and bodily restrictions can thrive. These opportunities for activity involving self-realization would meet a human need to engage in it.

2. (b) Positive duties: There should be a social ethos and institutions articulating positive duties to produce to meet other people’s needs. Each should envisage some reasonable level of development and use of their powers to produce in this way.

3. (c) Securing basic needs: Some instantiations of the positive duties mentioned in (b) targeting the satisfaction of basic needs for subsistence and for being able to function as a political equal have especial urgency.

4. (d) Fair reciprocity: There should be an ethos and a scheme of distribution of access to consumption goods that recognizes a responsibility to cooperate in production on terms of fair reciprocity. Nobody should take advantage of cooperative efforts of others without making their own, similar effort if they can. Similar effort is not equivalence in output (which might depend on morally arbitrary differences in native endowments), but a matter of the proportion of contribution given one’s abilities. Those (but only those) who make an equal effort (when they can) should have equal access to consumption goods.

5. (e) Sensitivity to individual differences: Individual differences in abilities and needs are important. The assessment of levels of contribution should be mindful of differences in ability. And people should be able to pursue their well-being in ways appropriate to their singular characteristics. For example, they should be able to make their own choices concerning self-realization, consumption and leisure.

The Abilities/Needs Principle helps envision an economy of mutual affirmation amongst all producers and consumers. It takes the abilities and needs of all as the focus of negative and positive duties. As a result, it gives human dignity full recognition. Importantly, this vision combines freedom and solidarity. This, I think, is a Kantian point. Kant’s moral philosophy obviously affirms rights concerning individual and collective liberty. But it also affirms duties to contribute to the freedom and well-being of others.Footnote ³⁶ With the refinements proposed here, the Kantian dignitarian framework can escape the scorn Marx directed at the ‘Robinsonades’ of modern political theory.Footnote ³⁷

Self-emancipation

Some Kantians could criticize the view just outlined by saying that it risks a paternalistic imposition on workers of work they might not choose, even if it would involve self-realization. In response, notice four points. First, people are given real opportunities to engage in non-exploitative, non-dominating and non-alienating labour; they are not forced to do so. The scheme empowers workers; it does not force them into any final state. Second, the shaping of the economy would be subject to democratic authorization and contestation. Enjoying robust political liberties, people could collectively assess and reform economic arrangements of the kind proposed. Third, we should acknowledge that any society that has not completely eliminated material scarcity will need, and press, people to work. If this is so, it is only fair that they have opportunities to work in ways that engage rather than stunt their valuable capacities for free and cooperative production. Finally, the interest in the good of self-realization is linked to some of the capacities that give rise to status-dignity, and thus to the normative platform from which the paternalism objection itself draws its argumentative force. Responding to the dignity of people includes supporting their pursuit of a well-being involving the development and exercise of their valuable human capacities.

Despite popular misperceptions, Marx, and socialists inspired by him, are quite hostile to paternalism. This is partly why, for example, Marx was hostile to developing detailed recipes for how socialist transformation should proceed. He thought that ‘the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself’,Footnote ³⁸ and that this self-emancipation would likely exhibit a radical democratic form (as his praise for the Paris Commune suggests).Footnote ³⁹

Ideology and socialist politics

Also important for the Marxian view of politics is the critique of ideology, of attempts to shape the culture of a society so that the domination of some by others is deemed acceptable. Typical of ideologies is the presentation of the contingent as necessary, the historical as natural and the conflictive as harmonious.Footnote ⁴⁰ Ideology critique has a role in dissolving these constructions. It shows that, often, what is presented as being in the general interest of all in fact only serves the particular interest of the dominant class. Interestingly, this operation can work in tandem with the Social Contract Standard. We can see socialist politics as a radical democracy in which people engage in public debate to figure out together what the idea of the social contract would really amount to for them, and decide by themselves what to do about economic justice.

Ideology critique can even target deployments of the idea of dignity in capitalism which dissociate it from solidarity. Marx in fact criticized conceptions that mischaracterize non-instrumental support for fellow human beings as involving ‘humiliation’ and ‘an offence against the dignity of man’ while condoning their treatment as commodities as ‘the justified, self-confident and self-acknowledged dignity of man incarnate’.Footnote ⁴¹ In opposition to a view of dignity that embraces possessive individualism to legitimize the social power and disproportionate benefits enjoyed by the rich, the lucky and the strong, socialists put forward a more humane project that relies on generally shareable reasons to have opportunities for the free and cooperative development and exercise of our capacities, to be offered support by others when we need it, and to give it when we can. This project charts a fitting practical horizon for the hope that human dignity always inspires.Footnote ⁴²