Abstract
This paper sketches a partial account of human dignity. The account is Kantian in the loose sense of having been inspired by some of Kant’s views. But it contrasts sharply with a traditional Kantian account. The paper tries to isolate some shortcomings of the traditional account – in particular that it condemns as morally impermissible certain actions of heroic self-sacrifice as well as certain actions of privileging the young over the old in the distribution of scarce, life-saving resources. The new account attempts to avoid such implications while preserving some of the traditional account’s attractive features. According to the new account, dignity is preeminent and unconditional value, possessed by all and only persons, that is, beings who have certain psychological capacities, including autonomy. An agent’s action expresses respect for persons’ dignity if, without treating anyone merely as a means, he or she aims in performing it to maximize persons’ preservation. The paper distinguishes between two dimensions along which person preservation might be maximized and suggests how to weigh each of these dimensions in decisions about whom to try to preserve.
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Notes
- 1.
The new account is based on an account of respect for persons originally developed and defended in Bognar and Kerstein (2009).
- 2.
- 3.
As Kerstein (2009a) tries to show, other sorts of cases also pose difficulties for the traditional account. It seems to condemn as morally impermissible cases of what many of us take to be legitimate killing in self-defense and legitimate withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment.
- 4.
I consider and try to rebut several objections to this conclusion in Kerstein (2009a). But note that in the “casuistical questions” Kant raises after he discusses the duty not to commit suicide, he asks: “Is it murdering oneself to hurl oneself to certain death (like Curtius) in order to save one’s country? – or is deliberate martyrdom, sacrificing oneself for the good of all humanity, also to be considered an act of heroism?” (Kant 1996b [1797]: 423–424). If we take the respect-expression approach to FH, then in my view such a self-sacrificial act does turn out to be “murdering oneself” and thus to be morally impermissible. In the “Notes on the lectures of Mr. Kant on the metaphysics of morals” taken by Johann Friedrich Vigilantius, we read: “It is permissible to venture one’s life against the danger of losing it; yet it can never be allowable for me deliberately to yield up my life, or to kill myself in fulfillment of a duty to others; for example, when Curtius plunges into the chasm, in order to preserve the Roman people he is acting contrary to duty […]” (Kant 1997 [1793]: 629).
- 5.
The account of maximizing person preservation that follows stems from and is defended in greater detail in Bognar and Kerstein (2009).
- 6.
A complete weighting scheme would, of course, need to take into account the uncertainty of a choice regarding person year and person number preservation.
- 7.
For a more restrictive account, see Kaufmann (Chapter 5, this volume).
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- 9.
Here is what a more fully specified account of treating others merely as means would look like: Suppose an agent uses another. She uses him merely as a means if it is reasonable for her to believe that something she does to the other renders him unable to consent to her using him, unless it is also reasonable for her to believe either that she is using the other in order to prevent him from intentionally doing something that renders someone unable to consent to his (the other’s) using him, or that if, before using the other in a particular way in order to attain her end, the agent were able, without rendering her action ineffectual, to inform him of her intention to do so and she did inform him of it, the other would voluntarily consent to her using him in this way. For further discussion, see Kerstein (2009b).
- 10.
Perhaps they would appeal to Kant’s own account of treating oneself merely as a means and suggest that since PFC McGinnis did that, he failed to respect his own dignity. It is not easy to discern what treating oneself merely as a means amounts to, according to Kant. For one attempt see Kerstein (2008). Of course, given the account of treating someone merely as a means that I have sketched, it is hard, although not in my view impossible, to think of cases in which a person treats himself merely as a means.
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Kerstein, S.J. (2011). Dignity and Preservation of Personhood. In: Kaufmann, P., Kuch, H., Neuhaeuser, C., Webster, E. (eds) Humiliation, Degradation, Dehumanization. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 24. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9661-6_16
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