Dignity

Abstract

Empathie self‐transformation and a healing presence are key to successful therapy. Empathy, the willingness and ability to understand and care about the suffering of another person, requires a loving attitude. Love, in this context, is defined as joyful awareness, accompanied by a desire to nurture and to treasure. Empathie self‐transformation is a process of overcoming our personal barriers to feeling empathy and love for our client. Healing presence is a way of being with others that inspires confidence, security, hope and the opportunity to be understood and appreciated. The goal of therapy is to help clients maximize their ability to be empathie and loving toward themselves and others. In contrast, biological psychiatry views people as objects and suppresses their feelings, thus interfering with empathy and the creation of a healing presence.     

On Dignity,a Sense of Dignity,and Inspirational Shame

ABSTRACT

The word dignity encompasses more than we can say of it. It is difficult to define, and yet we work with it every day in our offices. I explore various ideas about dignity, and then examine the place of dignity in the process of analysis and therapy. I draw out psychological components of dignity that are often strong themes in our psychoanalytic work. Many patients come to therapy as a result of assaults on their dignity, or from the effects of family situations that are so corrosive that they never developed a sense of their own dignity. For these patients, I think of therapy as a process of either finding or restoring dignity.     

人的尊严与生命伦理

“尊严”是频繁出现在生命伦理学中的一个概念,但关国学者麦克琳却在最近认为,尊严在生命伦理学中是个无用的概念,可以毫无损失地用其它概念,比如尊重人的自主性概念所代替。反驳了麦克琳的观点,定义了尊严的含义,认为生命伦理学的使命就是在当代生命科技高度发达的情况下如何尊重和保护人的尊严。     

Grounding Human Dignity

Abstract: What is the future of human dignity? Is there a limit on what can be done to human organisms? To approach such questions this article reviews some traditional understandings of human dignity and then offers a shift in perspective. Traditional areas in which human dignity has been grounded include the doctrine of the image of God, the notion of humanity as a reconciliation of opposites, the chronological place of humans in the process of creation, God's free grace, and the human capacity for union with the divine. Maintaining that dignity is reserved for the later stages of human development, the author suggests we shift our thinking from notions of dignity to those of value. A fertilized egg as a living organism is to be valued for its uniqueness and nature, but it does not acquire dignity until it individualizes within the larger process of embryogenesis.     

Human Rights and Human Dignity

Why should all human beings have certain rights simply by virtue of being human? One justification is an appeal to religious authority. However, in increasingly secular societies this approach has its limits. An alternative answer is that human rights are justified through human dignity. This paper argues that human rights and human dignity are better separated for three reasons. First, the justification paradox: the concept of human dignity does not solve the justification problem for human rights but rather aggravates it in secular societies. Second, the Kantian cul-de-sac: if human rights were based on Kant’s concept of dignity rather than theist grounds, such rights would lose their universal validity. Third, hazard by association: human dignity is nowadays more controversial than the concept of human rights, especially given unresolved tensions between aspirational dignity and inviolable dignity. In conclusion, proponents of universal human rights will fare better with alternative frameworks to justify human rights rather than relying on the concept of dignity.     

耻感与尊严

耻感是我在他人面前的一种特殊情感.他人在这里成为我的一面镜子,我在他人面前反观自照.我从他人那里认识我的存在、我现在的样子.因而耻感就其实质来说是我的耻感,它指向了自是,是自我的呈现.我之所以感到羞耻,是我存在的欠缺,耻感则是对这种欠缺的自觉意识.耻感的存在表明一个人善心犹存,还有人之为人的尊严存在.耻感的存在是一个人自尊的显现,并通过怨恨、苦恼等心理活动促进一个人尊严的提升.     

Autonomous Self-Expression and Meritocratic Dignity

While “dignity” plays an increasingly important role in contemporary moral and political debates, there is profound dispute over its definition, meaning, and normative function. Instead of concluding that dignity’s elusiveness renders it useless, or that it signals its fundamental character, this paper focuses on illuminating one particular strand of meritocratic dignity. It introduces a number of examples and conceptual distinctions and argues that there is a specific strand of “expressive” meritocratic dignity that is not connected to holding a special office or rank, but that is ascribed to individuals who are able to engage in autonomous self-expression.     

Human Dignity and Assisted Dying

The United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in its preamble, affirms ‘the inherent dignity and … the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family’ as ‘the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world’. However, advocates of assisted dying have proposed that human dignity is not inherent and that individuals should be able to determine their own dignity and quality of life. In response to this, it is suggested that persons who consider that their lives are no longer worth living, or believe that they have lost their ‘dignity’, are discriminating against themselves. Moreover, with assisted dying, as opposed to suicide, another person must also believe that it would be preferable for a person wishing to die not to continue living. In other words, assisted dying is a reflection of the unacceptable belief by a person that human dignity is not inherent and that another person can lose his or her dignity to such an extent that his or her life is no longer worth living and should be ended.     

The Political Ecology of Dignity: Human Dignity and the Inevitable Returns of Animality

Human dignity names a two‐tier political ecology: one moral‐political community whose members bear a special status of inviolability, and another larger community where violence and degradation are routine. Because ecological relations are never uni‐directional, the routinized violence that “belongs” in interactions with nonhuman animals returns, normalizing violence across gendered, racialized, and politicized lines of human difference. An account of dignity that begins from creaturely vulnerability rather than anthropological exceptionalism not only better expresses key theological insights of the Christian tradition, it also resists the repressed and disavowed violence generated by prevalent accounts of dignity.     

Hate Speech,Dignity and Self-Respect

This paper engages with the recent dignity-based argument against hate speech proposed by Jeremy Waldron. It’s claimed that while Waldron makes progress by conceptualising dignity less as an inherent property and more as a civic status which hate speech undermines, his argument is nonetheless subject to the problem that there are many sources of citizens’ dignitary status besides speech. Moreover, insofar as dignity informs the grounds of individuals’ right to free speech, Waldron’s argument leaves us balancing hate speakers’ dignity against the dignity of those whom they attack. I suggest instead that a central part of the harm of hate speech is that it assaults our self-respect. The reasons to respect oneself are moral reasons which can be shared with others, and individuals have moral reasons to respect themselves for their agency, and their entitlements. Free speech is interpreted not as an individual liberty, but as a collective enterprise which serves the interests of speakers and the receivers of speech. I argue that hate speech undermines the self-respect of its targets in both the agency and entitlement dimensions, and claim, moreover, that this is a direct harm which cannot be compensated for by other sources of self-respect. I further argue that hate speakers have no basis to respect themselves qua their hate speech, as self-respect is based on moral reasons. I conclude that self-respect, unlike dignity, is sufficient to explain the harm of hate speech, even though it may not be necessary to explain its wrongness.     

Dignity,Disability, and Lifespan

In the Paraplegia Case, we must choose either to preserve the life of a paraplegic for 10 years or that of someone in full health for the same duration. Non‐consequentialists reject a benefit‐maximising view, which holds that since the person in full health will have a higher quality of life, we ought to save him straightaway. In the Unequal Lifespan Case, we face a choice between saving one person for 5 years in full health and another for 25 years in full health. Frances Kamm has recently unfurled an Equal Respect Argument in an effort to support the position that while we ought to give each person a 50% chance of being saved in the Paraplegia Case, we are morally permitted to save straightaway the person who would live longer in the Unequal Lifespan case. The article tries to show that a Kant‐inspired account of the dignity of persons is far more successful than Kamm's argument in supporting this position. The Kant‐inspired account owes this success to its conceiving of respect for persons not primarily as respect for their pursuit of what is of value for them, but rather as respect for the value in them.     

Dignity in Three Acts

The author develops three distinct senses of “dignity” that materialize in Drozek’s paper. Dignity as intrinsic worth invites the question of whether the implicit notion of dignity in contemporary psychoanalysis is best viewed as Kantian and, if so, how we are to accommodate the rationalism that inheres in it. Dignity as a state of mind leads the author to sketch the view that dignity is imperiled by absence (of vitality, of realness), contrasting it with Drozek’s emphasis on badness. Dignity as a relational provision summons inquiry into the distinction between “valuing” and “recognizing” in the encounter between subjectivities. Recognition, it is suggested, not only begets love, but also serves as the most compelling analytic instantiation of the Kantian Formula for Humanity—to treat the other as an end. By spelling out these interrelated significations, we not only discern our debts to the concept of dignity but also reveal potential psychoanalytic contributions to the broader conversation about dignity’s essence.