Dignity and the Political Right to Freedom

• Jurisdiction: South Africa
• Published date: 15 August 2019
• Date: 15 August 2019
• Citation: 2008 Acta Juridica 177
• Author: Anton Fagan
• Pages: 177-184

Dignity and the Political Right to Freedom

ANTON FAGAN*

University of Cape Town

In the case of Ferreira v Levin NO, Justice Laurie Ackermann seemed to

make the assumption that the political right to freedom is best explained,

and its content therefore best determined, by the fact that all human

beings have dignity.

1

That is, he seemed to assume that dignity and the

fact that human beings necessarily possess it provide the key to an

understanding of the political right to freedom. This is, I think, an

assumption made by many. The aim of this essay is to question its validity.

Let me concede straight away that it is possible to provide a

dignity-based explanation of the political right to freedom. One way of

doing so is as follows:

(1) All human beings have dignity – either because they are human or

because, being human, they possess some dignity-conferring prop-

erty, such as rational agency.

(2) To have dignity is, as Kant explains in the Groundwork of the

Metaphysics of Morals, to have ‘intrinsic value’.

2

(3) Because human beings have intrinsic value, they have equal value.

This is so either because the intrinsic value of human beings is

incomparable or because the reason for human beings having

intrinsic value, for example their rational agency, entails that all have

it to the same degree.

(4) Because human beings have equal value, governments are under a

duty to treat their subjects with equal respect. Governments are

under a duty to treat their subjects with respect because their

subjects, as human beings, have value, and respect is the appropriate

response to anything of value. Since a government’s subjects all have

equal value, the respect due to each must be equal respect.

(5) Because governments are under a duty to treat their subjects with

equal respect, they are under a duty to remain neutral between their

subjects’ differing conceptions of the good life, that is, of what gives

value to life. For a government does not treat two subjects with

equal respect if it prefers one’s conception of the good life to that of

the other.

(6) Because governments are under a duty to remain neutral between

subjects’ conceptions of the good life, they are under a duty to

* W P Schreiner Professor of Law,University of Cape Town.

1

Ferreira v Levin NO and Others; Vryenhoek and Others v Powell NO and Others 1996 (1) SA

984 (CC) at 1012D–14C.

2

I Kant Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals translated by H J Paton (1948) at 96.

177

2008 Acta Juridica 177

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