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I. INTRODUCTION
1
Though see Stephen Engstrom and Jennifer Whiting (eds.), Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics: Rethinking
Happiness and Duty (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
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parallel ideas are present in other moral theories, even though they
may not make explicit use of the metaphor. Most moral theories
work with a conception of human development – whether it is
the possession and maintenance of physical and mental well-being,
the opportunity for and nurture of rational and social capacities, the
development of capabilities, or the formation and execution of
diverse life plans.6 These can be seen as ways of referring to human
flourishing. If flourishing differs at all from these it is in its ‘natu-
ralism’ and comprehensiveness, its acknowledgment of the empirical
and suggestion of an overall judgment of achievement within the
framework of a life cycle. The metaphor of flourishing gets us to
focus on humans as developing, natural objects. Moreover, flour-
ishing bespeaks normatively laden development and change – a
qualitative assessment of the developmental passage and accom-
plishment of a living thing. The plant/animal/human that does not
progress over its life cycle or that changes for the worse does not
flourish but stagnates, withers, suffers, or weakens.
When we claim that a plant or animal flourishes (with flourishing
construed here as both process and achievement) we are usually
intending to assert that, overall, the plant/animal is coming or has
come to exemplify the qualities that we associate with a good
member of its kind. Here ‘good’ is not used in a moralistic sense but
simply to indicate that, so far as the particular animal or plant is
concerned, it is a good example of its kind.7 (Whether it is good in
some more general or moralistic sense is another matter.) We have a
conception of what the plant or animal is capable of developing into
and, insofar as it achieves that, it flourishes. Something of the same
idea – though with important variations – might also be claimed of
humans. A person who flourishes is, as a person, doing well – but in
this case, as we shall see, the judgment has subjective as well as
6
In connection with human rights, we find this most commonly brought out in the works of
Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. See, e.g., Amartya Sen, ‘Capabilities and Well-Being’, in The
Quality of Life, ed. Martha C. Nussbaum Amartya Sen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 30–53;
and, most recently, Martha Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cam-
bridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2011). Thomas Pogge suggests that the capabilities
approach, despite its sympathies with the flourishing metaphor, is unsuited to giving all individuals
equal consideration – a core part of our conception of dignity. We are unable to engage with Pogge’s
comprehensive critique of the capabilities approach, but note it here. See Thomas Pogge, ‘Can the
Capability Approach Be Justified?’, Philosophical Topics 30, no. 2 (2002): 167–228. Our own account of
flourishing offers a pathway to dignity.
7
See G.H. von Wright, The Varieties of Goodness (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963).
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11
Nevertheless, the ideas of self-transformation and the mode of its realization need not be seen as
exclusive.
12
This is no place to engage the nature-nurture controversy. It may be an insoluble one. See Susan
Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution, 2nd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2000).
13
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard/Belknap, 1971), but cf. Nussbaum,
‘Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach’, in Quality of Life, 242–269. In later parts of this paper,
Nussbaum relaxes to what she terms a departure from the ‘uninterpreted’ experience detailed by
Aristotle, to claim that though sensitive to contexts, there are certain experiences that are, in greater or
lesser degree, common to all humans, and that these serve to frame human possibilities for flourishing.
14
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ch. 1.
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21
Ecosystems, however, may be a bit more sensitive to the unregulated flourishing of exotics.
22
Cf. William Shakespeare’s ‘seven ages of man’, As You Like It, II, vii. 139–166.
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element in its telos, but we do not narrowly restrict it to this. And that
is also true of humans. Although reproduction (along with nurturing
the next generation) may be an important element within broadly
human tele, individual humans are less confined to a reproductive
telos. Even if reproduction and nurture are commonly considered
important options for humans, their rich capacities for reflective and
responsive practical activities give their flourishing a far wider range
of possibilities.23 Because human flourishing is a process as well as an
end, it is best perhaps to think of that end in processual terms.
It is the fact and kind of human flourishing that gives it an
important place in moral theory. The point is not that ethical con-
straints can be derived from a notion of individual flourishing in the
way that Harman believes is hopelessly relativistic, but that the
multiple ways in which humans can flourish and the social dimen-
sions to that achievement require that we develop dispositions
(virtuous habits) and social rules (moral rules and principles) that
enable such diverse flourishing to occur. Central to such will be
respectful and empathic attitudes, various rules concerning harm and
offense to others, and so on. These will constitute a shared moral
minimum.24 But as progressive beings in the Millian sense we might
hope for more – open-mindedness, kindness, and a broad sense of
social justice, for starters, and maybe more general habits such as
curiosity, creativity, industriousness, discretion, and truthfulness.
The point here is not to suggest a definitive list,25 or a list to be
exemplified by each individual, but rather to set the development of
social attitudes and rules, including those of a more strictly moral
kind, into the context of an evolving understanding of the diverse
ways in which humans may flourish.
What, in sum, is accomplished by the appeal to human flourishing?
Although it is a horticultural metaphor, it is not an alien or unhelpful
one. Humans, like plants, are part of a natural bio-order in which
23
Because human flourishing is so multifaceted and self-determined, we might sometimes speak of
people flourishing even if certain of the factors that we usually associate with human flourishing are not
present. People may treat their deleterious conditions as opportunities rather than disabilities. In this
respect, those who age may also continue to flourish. Those who flourish in conditions of adversity are
often objects of special admiration. Alternatively, some may engage in tradeoffs of the conditions for
flourishing; thus a scholar may sacrifice physical robustness for additional opportunities to engage in
scholarly pursuits.
24
This view has been defended, in much stronger naturalistic terms than those we use here, in
Philip Kitcher, The Ethical Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
25
Cf. Nussbaum, ‘Non-Relative Virtues’.
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27
The term used by Doris Schroeder, ‘Dignity: Two Riddles and Four Concepts’, Cambridge
Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 17 (2008): 230–238.
28
Various typologies of dignity have recently been proposed. Schroeder, for example, differentiates
Kantian, aristocratic, comportment, and meritorious dignity (ibid). More recently Leslie Meltzer Henry
has offered five conceptions of dignity – dignity as institutional status, equality, liberty, personal
integrity, and collective virtue, ‘The Jurisprudence of Dignity’, University of Pennsylvania Law Review 160
(2011): 169–233. As Henry’s Wittgensteinian account suggests, these represent overlapping rather than
discrete accounts. We believe that our own discussion is sensitive to these nuances.
29
Here we equivocate regarding whether dignity belongs to ‘humans’ or ‘persons,’ Or, to use a
slightly different dichotomy, whether it belongs to ‘humanity’ or ‘individuals’. Although the alternative
characterizations are often used interchangeably, they need not be, and in some of the debates that have
occurred the distinctions are deemed critical. As the last large paragraph of this section indicates, we are
uncomfortable with these options.
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31
For overviews, see Izhak England, ‘Human Dignity from Antiquity to Modern Israel’s Consti-
tutional Framework’, Cardozo Law Review 21 (May 2000): 1903–1927; Charles Trinkhaus, ‘Renaissance
Idea of the Dignity of Man’, Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, ed. Philip P.
Wiener (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973–1974), vol. IV, 136–146, available at:
http://etext.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhiana.cgi?id=dv4-20; Richard C. Dales, ‘A Medieval View of
Human Dignity’, Journal of the History of Ideas 38, no. 4 (October–December 1979): 557–572. More
recently, Michael Rosen has provided a compact and provocative genealogy in Dignity: Its History and
Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
32
M. Tulli Ciceronius, De Officiis, ed. M. Winterbottom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
33
Ibid., I, 39.
34
See Giannozzo Manetti, De dignitate et excellentia hominis libri IV; Book 4 trans. by Bernard
Murchland in Two Views of Man: Pope Innocent III On the Misery of Man; Giannozzo Manetti On the
Dignity of Man (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966).
35
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, De dominis dignitate oratio, trans. as Oration on the Dignity of Man,
by A. Robert Caponigri (Chicago: Gateway, 1956). Pico did not title this oration, which was published
posthumously.
36
Ibid., 7.
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On the other hand, Kant says that the capacity to make human
universal law is constitutive of our human dignity only if those
who exercise such capacity also subject themselves to the laws that
they make. What Kant is adverting to is that there is more to
human dignity than our capacity for certain kinds of decisional
determinations. Such determinations must also be reflected in our
own person. We must carry or comport ourselves in a certain way
if we are to be creatures with dignity – as moral agents committed
to the norms we articulate. Human dignity is not only a status; it
has an expressive dimension.
These two aspects of dignity have often been sundered in
subsequent discussion – to the point that dictionaries will often
distinguish, as two distinct meanings of ‘dignity’, one that focuses
on our capacities and the other that focuses on our bearing or
comportment. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, offers
as its second usage of dignity: ‘honourable or high estate, position,
or estimation; honour; degree of estimation, rank’, and as its fourth
usage: ‘nobility or befitting elevation of aspect, manner, or style;
becoming or fit stateliness, gravity’.44 Although treated as distinct
and even separate, these two accounts belong together as two
dimensions of a single account of human dignity.45 If we recall the
roots of our current conception of human dignity as a kind of social
rank, we are presented with a person who not only had a certain
status but was also expected to manifest it in certain forms of social
behavior. There were not two kinds of dignity – dignity of status
and dignity of bearing – but a single dignity that had two aspects.
Understood as the status owed to humans by virtue of their
expressed capacity to determine their actions by means of
normative and especially moral considerations, dignity is linked
to the notions of rationality and autonomy.46 For it is as rational
beings that we are able to make normative judgments and engage
in moral decision making, and our autonomy consists in our
44
Oxford English Dictionary Online, second edn., 1989; online version June 2012, available at:
http://www.oed.com.ez.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/view/Entry/52653; accessed 01 September 2012.
45
We do not mean to imply that they cannot be sundered – they can be and have been. But we
suggest that there goes with the first usage an expectation of the second. For Kant, the willing of
something as universal law obligates oneself as well as applying to others.
46
In a more extensive discussion, we could draw various links to equality, given that universalized
dignity is possessed by all humans. Some of the connections are noted in Henry, ‘The Jurisprudence of
Dignity’, 207 n. 192.
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47
Kant, it might be noted, limits dignity to humanity ‘insofar as it is capable of morality’
(Groundwork, 42).
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48
See, e.g., John Kleinig, ‘Persons, Lines and Shadows’, Ethics, 100, no. 1 (October, 1989): 108–115;
also, Valuing Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 194–207. Another possibility, in such
cases, would be to grant them honorific status – to see humanity as a special status category.
49
The kind of conceptual connection that exists between human flourishing and human dignity is
not to be thought of in terms of logical necessity. There is a limited amount of that in social concepts. In
the central or paradigm cases, those who flourish will also qualify as those who possess dignity in both
of the aspects that we identified. But there will also be some Freds who display a form of flourishing
that is (relatively) devoid of moral virtue and constraint. It is similar to Aristotle’s distinction among
forms of friendship – companion friends and instrumental friends share important features with char-
acter friends, which leads us to call them all friends, but the latter nevertheless lack certain important
features of character friendship, which Aristotle considers to be the most ‘real’ type of friendship.
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50
The point is not that those who are deficient in some of the ‘objective’ conditions cannot flourish.
The remarkable thing about humans is their ability to work around the ‘objective’ constraints under
which they find themselves, perhaps even to the point of making such deficits the centerpiece of a life
lived well. Thus, in some of the phenomenological literature, the ‘lived body’, with its needs and
possibilities, is seen as a special opportunity for and site of human dignity. See, for example, Jennifer
Bullington, ‘Being Body: The Dignity of Human Embodiment’, in Dignity in Care for Older People, ed.
Lennart Nordenfeldt (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2009), ch 3.
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62
Kant, The Metaphysical Elements of Justice, trans. John Ladd (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965),
Akad. 328.
63
Griffin goes further than we do in linking his substitute for dignity (normative agency) to a
catalogue of human rights.
64
Mill, On Liberty, ch. 3.
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VI. CONCLUSION
John Kleinig
Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics
Charles Sturt University, Canberra, Australia
Nicholas G. Evans
School of Philosophy, Research School of Social Sciences,
Australian National University, Canberra, Australia