Naming the Source of Dignity: A Fifth Response

My student Steven Albright responds to the question:

The student who said that the responses come from not wanting to think about finals is very much correct.  Today it was much more agreeable to me to think about dignity than to study for finals (or finish that final reflection paper on the course. whoops!)

 

As Fr. Araujo correctly points out, this dignity can be discovered through reason.  The imago Dei reasoning might not be persuasive to all individuals but we can still get to the answer as a logical extension of the natural law.  Through the natural law we can generally discover how to treat others correctly.  The question of “to whom” naturally follows “how.”

 

I'm not sure that this question about who merits dignity is the result of a “modern philosophical shift” as another student put it.(although that shift has certainly exacerbated the problem)  The concept of the “other” has been used throughout history as an easy method of rationalizing evil acts.  The evil ceases to be wrong in the mind of the actor when we strip the dignity from the target of that evil.  Looking back to the Bible, the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) presents a similar situation.  After asking what he must do to inherit eternal life, part of which is to love his neighbor as himself, the lawyer asks those familiar words “And who is my neighbor?”  Understanding how he is required to act, the lawyer attempts to weasel out of that requirement. (“[b]ut because he wished to justify himself...”v29)

 

Regarding the more modern approaches to deciding who is deserving of dignity, I see them as simply more sophisticated versions of the same argument.  These other flawed definitions, however, are extremely dangerous because they seem to be logical unless we stop and consider their implications. 

 

As the student in the fourth response suggests with the discussion of nominalism, we are approaching the question from the wrong angle if we try to define who is deserving instead of presuming that everyone is worthy and from there make attempts to justify the potential exclusion of anyone.  From that perspective it becomes much more difficult to deny that dignity to an individual.