8

A Brief History of Human Dignity:

Idea and Application

Milton Lewis

The Roots of the Idea in the West

Although the explicit application of the idea of human dignity in international

politics and law is very recent, its roots stretch back to the early stages of Western
civilization. Two characteristics of the West are important as preconditions for the
development of the idea: the West’s belief in the universal validity of its norms and
its eventual basing of its norms in secular principles.
Both Judeo-Christian monotheism and the Graeco-Roman world’s understand-
ing of humankind underpinned a universalistic view of man’s unique place in the
cosmos. Historical sociologist, Max Weber looked to the dual heritage of
Christianity and Roman law for the origins of what he famously saw as the unique
rationalistic character of Western social, economic, and political relations that ulti-
mately led to modern capitalism and the bureaucratic nation-state.
In Rome, the concept of dignity had moral, political, legal, and social meanings;
the first referred to integrity or indifference to profit; the second in the Republican
era was associated with those in high public offices like the various magistracies,
the dignitates; it had another meaning, associated with high social rank; and in law
it was applied strictly as ‘greater’ or ‘lesser’ in relation to rank and social condition.
It is clear that in Rome dignity was not equally distributed.
Roman law was a rational system of secular law, based on the authority of the col-
lective will, the res publica, not on divine authority as interpreted from sacred texts.
As Rome became the ruler of the known, civilized world, it adopted the stoic idea of
a universal law of nature offering justice and order to all. Through reason, man is part
of a rationally organized universe. Reason and nature are congruent. The law of
nature is identified with reason and so society, too, is based on the rule of reason.
Since all men were moved by ‘right reason,’ as Cicero and the Roman jurists
who came after him saw it, there existed an ontological equality of humankind.
This equality entailed a universal republic and the state was a moral enterprise
devoted to the common good of citizens; not merely a framework for the pursuit of
interests or for the exercise of an absolute sovereign will.1

1
C.R. Miguel, ‘Human Dignity: History of an Idea’, http://search.netscape.com/ns/boomframe.
jsp?query = human±dignity = history = idea = miguel&page = 1&0ffset = 0&, 20 January 2005,

93
J. Malpas and N. Lickiss (eds.), Perspectives on Human Dignity: A Conversation, 93–105.
© Springer 2007.
94 M. Lewis

Christian theology constructed the idea of dignity, and among the Church Fathers,
St. Leo the Great (died 461) is said to have contributed greatly to the construction in
two ways: his proposition that baptism confers dignity on Christians; and that because
humans are made in the image of God and God became human, all humans have
dignity. Being born having dignity, all humans have equal dignity. Dignity is an onto-
logical category from this theological perspective.
Two works of St. Augustine (354–430) were significant for the theological tradi-
tion concerning the dignity of man. In De Genesi ad litteram, Augustine sees the
Fall as seriously corrupting God’s image in man and his/her ability to be virtuous
is only restored with the Atonement. In De Trinitate, man’s triune soul, composed
of memory, intellect, and will, corresponds to the Holy Trinity which created him.
Even intellect and will could be good or evil depending on how they were exer-
cised; good if directed to divinity and evil if directed elsewhere.
St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) differed from Leo in that he saw human dig-
nity rooted in nature, not theology. As a person, a human being is naturally free.
Dignity is lost when sin is committed. The rational human then assumes the status
of a nonrational beast. Dignity, then, is an ethical, not an ontological category.
The humanist philosophers of the Renaissance proceeded further down the path
opened by Aquinas’s concern with the natural roots of human dignity and came to
celebrate the glory, not condemn the sinfulness of humankind. Giannozzo Manetti
(1396–1459) in his De dignitate et excellentia hominis (1452) advanced both theo-
logical and naturalistic arguments: humans are creatures of God but much superior
to the rest of creation and their natures are related to the divine one; indeed such is
the perfection of their bodies and souls that we are getting close to seeing God as
the image of man. Humans are born having dignity and have it in equal measure.
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) wrote perhaps the best-known
Renaissance piece on the concept, De hominis dignitate (1486). All creation is
strictly governed by God’s laws except humans to whom God has given free will to
determine their own natures. Dignity comes from this freedom to be what you will.
Like Manetti, Pico sees humans as being born possessing dignity and having it in
equal amount. But where Manetti sees dignity arising from human excellence, Pico
sees it in the freedom to attain such excellence.
The Renaissance humanists had begun to advance nontheological arguments for
dignity, but they also remained attached to Christianity’s transcendental realm. The
empiricism of David Hume’s (1711–1776) essay on the dignity or meanness of
human nature means a naturalistic approach to dignity has prevailed: not metaphysics
but empirical facts show that a human being may behave in a worthy way; humans
are naturally inclined to behave worthily (although it is not certain they will always
do so); when he/she has a self-image of being worthy, a person will try to act up to it;
finally, while not born having dignity, all humans tend to become worthy.

pp.2–3; Y. Arieli, ‘On the Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for the Emergence of the Doctrine
of the Dignity of Man and His Rights’, in: D. Kretzmer and E. Klein (eds.), The Concept of Human
Dignity in Human Rights Discourse (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2002), pp.9–17.