Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht

Dignity

4 Min. Lesezeit

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: Würde

The dignity of the Person is not a status conferred from without, but an inalienable, objective value belonging to the essence of Personhood itself. It is not something the state grants, society confers, or one earns through achievement. It is not lost through illness, age, disability, or guilt. Alexander of Hales (1185—1245) already defined it thus: “The person is an independent being distinguished by the particularity belonging to its dignity.”

From the book

“The dignity of the human being is not a distinction one would have to acquire. It is no title that society confers and could withdraw again. It belongs to the essence of every human person — inalienable, inviolable, from conception to death.”

— The Results at a Glance, Chapter 6 (German)

What is common to and unites all the various fundamental conceptions of the person lies in the incomparable dignity of the person. Yet the grounding of this dignity differs fundamentally according to the concept of person (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 93—98). The substance-ontological concept of person grounds dignity in the being of the person: because the person is the most perfect thing in all of nature — as Thomas Aquinas puts it —, a respect is due to it that is non-negotiable.

One must distinguish two kinds of value. Ontological dignity belongs to every person merely by virtue of its existence. It is inalienable. Qualitative value, by contrast, can grow or diminish through free action in the third dimension. Even a human being who has incurred grave guilt remains a person with inalienable ontological dignity.

Dignity is grounded in the first dimension of personhood. It can therefore be annulled neither by lacking capacities nor by moral failure. From this dignity follows the Personalistic Norm: the human person is to be affirmed and loved for its own sake.

Dignity and Its Threats

The dignity of the person cannot be destroyed, but it can be disregarded. The gravest forms of such disregard are at the same time forms of Oblivion of the Person. War systematically negates dignity in killing. Power without responsibility subjects the person to the will of others. Money as the sole measure reduces the person to a price, although it is exalted above any price. Every Instrumentalization, whether through technology, economic structures, or political violence, violates dignity, even when it cannot extinguish the person.

Chapter assignment: Chapter 3: What Is a Person? (esp. 3.3.3), Chapter 1: Introduction, Chapter 4 (German)

Holiness

The highest level of value in the Ordo Amoris (Scheler: sensory < vital < spiritual < holy). It concerns the value-response to the Absolute and the Unconditioned. Otto: the Holy as mysterium tremendum et fascinans.

Holiness belongs to the axiological perfection in the Third Dimension of personhood: it is the highest stage of moral realization, in which the person wholly transcends itself toward the Absolute. In holiness, what is laid out in virtue, love, and knowledge comes to fulfilment — the agreement of life with what the person, by its essence, is and ought to be. Conscience plays a decisive role here as the instance that orients the human being toward the good and the true.

Ontological relations:

Vulnerability

Vulnerability designates the condition of a Person whose actualization of one or more dimensions of Personhood depends on the help of others. It concerns in particular embryos, children, the sick, the old, and the disabled — that is, persons who are in special need of care.

Vulnerability in no way diminishes personhood: the Dignity of the vulnerable person is the same as that of every other person, for it is grounded not in the actualization of the dimensions, but in personhood itself. Vulnerability precisely reveals the depth of interpersonality: it calls the other Someone into responsibility and makes the Personalistic Norm especially urgent. Where the vulnerability of a person is ignored or exploited, there is a particularly grave form of practical Oblivion of the Person.

Ontological classification

Genus: Being

Ontological relations:

Ontological classification: Genera: Archphenomenon, Essential Characteristic

Ontological relations:

Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.

Further sources:

  • Alexander of Hales: Summa Theologica, Lib. III, Inq. 1 (ca. 1245) (person and dignity) (German).
  • Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae I, q. 29, a. 3 (the person as “the most perfect thing in all of nature”).

See also

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