The passage below is from the book What is a person? (U of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 442-444) written by University of Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith. Smiths work (what he calls critical realist personalism) supports the moral realist view that human beings truly have objective moral value (a.k.a. human dignity) and we know this. I post this for my sociology friends. What is it that most powerfully justifies moral commitments to things such as human rights, freedom of speech, the abolition of slavery, religious liberty, universal education, due process, racial nondiscrimination, the prohibition of torture and genocide, outrage against rape, the freedom of conscience, protections against starvation, and care for refugees? Not a utilitarian calculation. Not a social contract. Not the interests of the wealthy and powerful. Not the findings of naturalistic, positivistic, empiricist social science. What justifies these moral commitments is the recognition of the natural dignity of persons, which is ontologically real, analytically irreducible, and phenomenologically apparent. In naming the real about humans in this way we continue to pull back together fact and value, the is and the ought…. In all of this, we must acknowledge that not all people or cultures or philosophies have recognized or understood the fact of human dignity or often treated ordinary people with dignity. Quite the contrary. History is replete with failures to understand, affirm, and respect human dignity. Treating humans as possessing the dignity that is rightfully theirs by virtue of the ontology of personhood may be the exception, not the rule in human history…. How can we affirm real, objective, universal human dignity in the face of such massive misrecognition and violation of it? Does this not suggest that the idea of human dignity is actually a recent cultural invention of dubious ontology and relative value? No, I think not. Nothing whatsoever in a realist theory requires that people recognize and understand something in order for it truly to exist. Bacteria and germs existed and wreaked havoc on human bodies for most of history without anyone realizing they were real—it was not until the nineteenth century that the germ theory of disease became widely known and accepted. The objectively real moral fact that slavery is a categorical evil was likewise not widely appreciated throughout most of human history, yet in the United States peoples common erroneous moral understanding of slavery until the nineteenth century did not mean that slavery was not evil. It was evil—whether or not anyone realized it. Human dignity does not become real for us simply because we start believing in it, any more than our heliocentric solar system became real when people started believing in it. It always was true. What needed to happen was simply for people to conform their hitherto mistaken minds to what was already true about the real. This was the case with Copernican astronomy. This is the case with human dignity. … [T]here are certain institutional facts that are real social things and made so precisely by people believing in them, through social construction—things like money, representative government, and sports. But human dignity is not an institutional fact. Dignity is, in Searles terms, a brute fact of ontological reality that is a characteristic and ineliminable property of emergent personhood. Dignity is rooted in the nature of things personal [i.e., human beings], not in ideas or discourse. So the fact that not all people or cultures or philosophies have recognized or understood or respected human dignity does not touch the question of its existence. This nevertheless compels us to recognize the historically conditioned nature of humanitys awareness of its own dignity. The recognition of human dignity has not been a historical constant. Various people, cultures, and philosophies have at different times throughout history explicitly articulated the reality of personal dignity. But the clear understanding of the inalienable, universal nature of human personal dignity that emerged in the twentieth century—especially in the wake of Nazi Germany and World War II—and that is now expressed in many national constitutions, the Charter of the United Nations, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was the outcome of long historical developments shaped by a variety of different religious, ethical, philosophical, and cultural traditions unfolding over time. Like most of human knowledge about people and the world, knowledge of human dignity has also been historically dynamic and progressive. People today can say more about dignity that really is true than they used to be able to say—just like we can say more now about physics, medicine, ocean life, the brain, the moral status of child labor, and the origins of the cosmos than we could centuries ago.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Dec 2014 04:47:25 +0000
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