First, dignity is relative. One doesn't have to be a scientific or moral relativist to notice that ascriptions of dignity vary radically with the time, place, and beholder. In olden days, a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. We chuckle at the photographs of Victorians in starched collars and wool suits hiking in the woods on a sweltering day, or at the Brahmins and patriarchs of countless societies who consider it beneath their dignity to pick up a dish or play with a child. Thorstein Veblen wrote of a French king who considered it beneath his dignity to move his throne back from the fireplace, and one night roasted to death when his attendant failed to show up. Kass finds other people licking an ice-cream cone to be shamefully undignified; I have no problem with it.
Second, dignity is fungible. The Council and Vatican treat dignity as a sacred value, never to be compromised. In fact, every one of us voluntarily and repeatedly relinquishes dignity for other goods in life. Getting out of a small car is undignified. Having sex is undignified. Doffing your belt and spread- eagling to allow a security guard to slide a wand up your crotch is undignified. Most pointedly, modern medicine is a gantlet of indignities. Most readers of this article have undergone a pelvic or rectal examination, and many have had the pleasure of a colonoscopy as well. We repeatedly vote with our feet (and other body parts) that dignity is a trivial value, well worth trading off for life, health, and safety.
Third, dignity can be harmful. In her comments on the Dignity volume, Jean Bethke Elshtain rhetorically asked, "Has anything good ever come from denying or constricting human dignity?" The answer is an emphatic "yes." Every sashed and be-medaled despot reviewing his troops from a lofty platform seeks to command respect through ostentatious displays of dignity. Political and religious repressions are often rationalized as a defense of the dignity of a state, leader, or creed: Just think of the Salman Rushdie fatwa, the Danish cartoon riots, or the British schoolteacher in Sudan who faced flogging and a lynch mob because her class named a teddy bear Mohammed. Indeed, totalitarianism is often the imposition of a leader's conception of dignity on a population, such as the identical uniforms in Maoist China or the burqas of the Taliban.
If we actually took the first of these points seriously, we would have to take it as an argument that all morality is relative. Ascriptions of any moral notion vary radically from place to place, time to time, culture to culture. This is utterly irrelevant to evaluation of any of them. Not all such variations are equally rationally supportable, or equally conscientiously sustainable, and it is at this that a reasonable inquiry into the value of a moral notion will look.
Moreover, Pinker is clearly equivocating in both the latter half of the first point and the whole of the second point: nobody thinks that strange clothes or a medical exam are a violation of any moral notion of dignity, because they are not even relevant to the subject. There is no identifiable sense in which having sex is morally undignified; indeed, not being a prude like Pinker, I would deny that having sex is undignified in any rationally sustainable sense. The security example is better: clearly the example does at least border on issues of human dignity, which, of course is why we keep a close eye on security procedures. Nor does it take any great acumen to recognize that "getting out of a small car" is not undignified in any sense relevant to the discussion; Pinker is being sloppy, thinking he can just throw things out there without critical examination. It doesn't take much to discover that Kass often is guilty of the same sloppiness, but that, of course, doesn't excuse Pinker in the least.
The third point, which would have been really interesting if Pinker had bothered to make use of any reasoning skills to develop it, manages to flop on both accounts. Ceremonial dignity is palpably a different sort of dignity than the dignity of someone treated with moral respect (no one thinks that hosting the Olympics proves that Nazi Germany had even a minimal respect for human dignity); and even if it weren't, the fact that despots try to wrap themselves in it tells us nothing about whether the notion of moral dignity is dangerous. Despots wrap themselves in any moral notion available: what this shows is not that every moral notion is dangerous but that despots are hypocrites trying to manipulate the masses. What this calls for is not rejection of the moral notions despots use, but a greater insistence on the difference between the merely superficial imitation of them and the substantive application of them.
He does have one genuinely interesting argument in the whole piece:
A free society disempowers the state from enforcing a conception of dignity on its citizens. Democratic governments allow satirists to poke fun at their leaders, institutions, and social mores. And they abjure any mandate to define "some vision of 'the good life'" or the "dignity of using [freedom] well" (two quotes from the Council's volume). The price of freedom is tolerating behavior by others that may be undignified by our own lights. I would be happy if Britney Spears and "American Idol" would go away, but I put up with them in return for not having to worry about being arrested by the ice-cream police. This trade-off is very much in America's DNA and is one of its great contributions to civilization: my country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty.
Ok, well, cut out the equivocation with Britney Spears again. But when we avoid the obvious equivocation on 'dignity' running throughout Pinker's essay, the argument turns out to be not so clearly sustainable. After all, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Fourteenth Amendment: most people look at these not as 'disempowering the state from enforcing a conception of dignity on its citizens' but instead as protecting the dignity of its citizens. An interesting line of thought, but one that requires more rational development than Pinker deigns to give it.
What gets me about the whole thing is that most of the piece is really rhetorical puff whereby Pinker tries to associate himself with reason and critical thought (and his opponents with the lack of both), but in which he clearly has not taken the time or trouble to engage in either. Everyone, including Pinker himself, deserves better from him than they get here.
