The Dignity of Groups
| Jurisdiction | South Africa |
| Date | 15 August 2019 |
| Published date | 15 August 2019 |
| Citation | 2008 Acta Juridica 66 |
| Pages | 66-90 |
| Author | Jeremy Waldron |
The Dignity of Groups*
JEREMY WALDRON†
New York University
1.
Citizens of South Africa do not need me to tell them how important the
idea of dignity is in our modern conceptions of human rights. Human
dignity is the first of the values on which the South African Constitution
is founded and, along with equality and freedom, it is the basis of South
Africa’s Bill of Rights.
1
Dignity is asserted as the foundation, too, of
much of international human rights law. The United Nations Charter
tells us that the enterprise of setting up the UN is predicated on ‘faith . . .
in the dignity and worth of the human person,’ and ‘the inherent dignity
of the human person’ is also said to be the basis from which the contents
of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights are derived.
2
The implication is that if you want to understand human rights, you had
better begin by understanding human dignity. The meaning of dignity is
key to the meaning of rights.
2.
Maybe that is too quick. Some dismiss the language of dignity as mere
decoration. It is a fine-sounding phrase and there may be reasons to use it
in human rights rhetoric that do not have much to do with the conveying
of any determinate content. Sixty years ago, Bertram Morris observed
that ‘[f]ew expressions call forth the nod of assent and put an end to
analysis as readily as ‘‘the dignity of man’’’.
3
* Delivered as the 2007 Ben Beinart Memorial Lecture at the University of Cape Town,
July 23, 2007. It was a pleasure and a privilege to be invited to deliver the Ben Beinart
Memorial Lecture for 2007. I did not know Professor Beinart. But I have read a little of what
he has written – in particular, a fine article in Acta Juridica on the Rule of Law (1962 Acta Juridica
99) – and that is enough to fill me with admiration for his work as a jurist. It was an honour to
be able to talk about human dignity in a lecture dedicated to his memory. I am grateful to
Laurie Ackermann, Arthur Chaskalson, Drucilla Cornell, Dennis Davis, David Dyzenhaus,
Frank Michelman, Allen Wood, and others for helpful comments in the discussion that
followed the lecture.
† University Professor, New York University.
1
Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996, s 1: ‘The Republic of SouthAfrica is
one sovereign democratic state founded on the following values: (a) Human dignity, the
achievement of equality and the advancement of human rights and freedoms’; s 7 (1): ‘This Bill
of Rights is a cornerstone of democracy in South Africa. It enshrines the rights of all people in
our country and affirms the democratic values of human dignity, equality and freedom’; s 10:
‘Everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected’.
2
Charter of the United Nations, Preamble; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,
Preamble.
3
B Morris ‘The dignity of man’ (1946) 57 Ethics 57 at 57.
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2008 Acta Juridica 66
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I know a number of people – analytic philosophers mainly
4
– who say
they doubt whether ‘dignity’ really has any meaning at all to add to the
idea of human rights, or at least any meaning that could not be more
lucidly conveyed by a simpler and less pompous expression. Just tell us,
they say, what rights we are supposed to have and give us a clear and
straightforward account of each one of them; but an appeal to this vague
overarching idea as a sort of über-right – a right to dignity from which all
other rights derive – is at best redundant and at worst a confusing conceit.
Usually I have little sympathy for this sort of analytic destructiveness.
But in this context I think it is worth pressing a little on the meaning of
‘dignity’, to see what distinctive meaning it brings to the human rights
context. For there is an important question about dignity that needs to be
answered – a question about its relation to the individualism of human
rights.
Michael Ignatieff said in his Tanner Lectures that dignity goes with
individuality and that ‘there is no way round the individualism implicit in
the idea of dignity’.
5
Was he right about that? That is what I want to ask?
Since the beginning, human rights talk has been criticised as needlessly
individualist.
6
Some have resisted that characterisation and striven
mightily to introduce into human rights discourse talk of group rights,
such as cultural rights and language rights, and the rights of whole peoples
to self-determination. It is an uphill struggle, because certainly there is
some sort of bias in the human rights tradition towards the rights of human
individual. But claims about group rights continue to be made. And the
question that I think is worth asking is this: does the introduction of
dignity into the equation load the dice in favour of (or more heavily than
they are already loaded in favour of) an individualistic conception of
rights? Does the repeated emphasis on dignity in the South African
Constitution, for example, make that charter more of an individualistic
document than it needed to be or than it otherwise aspired to be? It is an
interesting question because in other ways the South African Constitu-
tion is distinguished by the emphasis that it already puts upon group
rights as well as individual rights.
7
But is that emphasis undercut by its
4
For a ferocious attack on the idea of dignity, albeit by a psychologist rather than an
analytic philosopher, see S Pinker ‘The stupidity of dignity’The New Republic (May 28, 2008),
available also at www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=d8731cf4-e87b–4d88-b7e7-f5059cd0bfbd. For a
somewhat milder and more nuanced critique, see C McCrudden, ‘Human dignity and judicial
interpretation of human rights’ (2008) 19 EuropeanJournal of International Law 655.
5
M Ignatieff Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (2001) at 166.
6
See the discussion in J Waldron Nonsense Upon Stilts: Bentham, Burke and Marx on the
Rights of Man (1988).
7
See Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996, s 235: ‘The right of the South
African people as a whole to self-determination, as manifested in this Constitution, does not
preclude, within the framework of this right, recognition of the notion of the right of
self-determination of any community sharing a common cultural and language heritage,
67THE DIGNITY OF GROUPS
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