Friday, November 12 was the second day of the annual fall conference of the Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame, dedicated this year to the topic of “Human Dignity in a Secular World.” As is customary, Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the most remarkable living philosophers, graced the event with what in European universities was traditionally called a lección magistral, a magisterial—that is, a Master’s—lecture. MacIntyre’s truly excellent lecture is available online, and highly recommended.
Over at The Postliberal Order, Patrick Deneen offers a crisp, suggestive summary of this “bombshell” lecture, in which MacIntyre, with delicious elegance and learned restraint, appeared to undermine the premise of the conference almost entirely. As Deneen recounts, MacIntyre began by reminding his audience that the modern concept of dignity was purposely developed in the wake of the Second World War as a kind of placeholder-notion, vacuous by design, “that people of various faiths, secularists, different traditions, and varying nationalities could agree upon as a basis for a decent political and social order.” One is reminded of Jacques Maritain shamelessly pointing out in 1947, regarding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that given the disagreement among the drafters and proponents of the declaration on the source of the rights, it was enough merely to enumerate them without committing to any view about what made them intelligible. Hence, dignity talk. It served as a stand-in for a minimum standard of treatment of persons, but without contributing very much to an understanding of what that minimum standard actually requires in practice. The only claim is that whatever it is, dignity is “inherent” to the human person as such.
MacIntyre, relying on the work of the great Charles De Koninck in The Primacy of the Common Good against the Personalists (among whom Maritain was counted), contrasted this view with the Thomistic doctrine of dignitas, according to which the “worth” of human persons lies not so much in persons themselves, but in the end to which, by nature and by grace, they are called: to know and love God. This glorious end, to which no other creature of the material universe has been called, is the source of the high worth, the dignitas, of human beings. By making choices on how to act, human beings can decide to cooperate in the attainment of that end or, alternatively, to depart from it. Accordingly, St. Thomas holds, they open themselves up to receive and confirm their dignitas or, if they choose the other path, to lose it (ST IIa-IIae, q. 64, a. 2, ad 3).
The purpose of the contrast between these two views for MacIntyre was clear: What use is there for a concept that, though high-sounding and pleasing in its loftiness, provides little real guidance when the practical questions of how to treat others arise? How should society treat Hitler, how should it treat a Satanist or a cannibal, how should it treat a murderer, a perjurer, a mother who aborts her child, an indigent who steals food to survive? Hand-waving about the inherent dignity of persons provides no actionable, concrete answer. As MacIntyre shows in the lecture, arguments based on such a vacuous concept are capable of justifying almost anything. Dignity thus understood is the opposite of a genuine moral notion—it directly impedes moral argument and thought.
The lecture’s Q&A brought this out well. Most of the questions fell back on this: If we do away with dignity, will we not have a moral free-for-all? What philosophical and rhetorical (that is, political) limit will we then have to oppose brutality and abuse of persons, if we can’t rely on invocations of dignity? MacIntyre’s answer was as illuminating as it was simple: dignity is useless here because none of these issues are questions of dignity, they are questions of justice.
We have no need for a concept like “dignity” to provide a moral framework for treating each person as they ought to be treated. That is what justice—which the tradition defined (following the Roman jurists) as the habitual disposition to give to each his due—is for. It is precisely the virtue of treating others as they ought to be treated. So what we need is not more perorations or disquisitions about dignity, but a return to a serious understanding of justice.
By pointing us to consider these dilemmas as questions of justice, however, MacIntyre cannot be calling us to approach them in the same philosophical register that is common to many modern discussions on dignity. That is, we cannot treat justice as merely another “value,” a high ideal or omega point of moral life. Thus understood, justice would be equally incapable of giving us concrete, actionable answers to questions about how we should treat persons in real life. Such a view would merely replace one vacuous concept with another.
No, what we need, if such practical dilemmas and questions are to be considered satisfactorily, is to return to a scientific understanding of justice. It will not even suffice to consider justice only philosophically as a virtue in the soul. What need to know is what justice requires in each instance. In other words, we don’t need more moral philosophy—we need Jurisprudence, the science of saying what is each person’s due in a particular case. The reason is simple: The questions that the language of dignity tries to address are practical questions, and unlike dignity talk, Jurisprudence is armed with the concepts, categories, and modes of argument best suited to answering them without collapsing into the emotivism that MacIntyre has famously lamented in moral discourse. In the lecture, he highlighted this point by noting that current discourse tends to place a heavier emphasis on the negative precepts of justice while being largely incapable of giving a compelling account of its positive precepts, which are equally obligatory (he suggested, rather provocatively, that this ill is on full display in the pro-life movement today, among others).
MacIntyre’s lecture thus squarely points to what we have elsewhere called the “juridical turn“—the need to address properly juridical questions from the perspective of a reinvigorated juridical science—with which this blog is concerned.
Rafael de Arízaga
