Abstract
For more than 10 years, I have advanced a conception of human dignity informed by ideas about community that are salient in the African philosophical tradition. According to the view, an individual has dignity if she is, by her nature, able to commune with others and to be communed with by them. I have argued that this conception of dignity, grounded in our communal nature, not only helps to make good foundational sense of many characteristically African moral prescriptions but also constitutes a strong rival to the globally dominant Kantian account in terms of our capacity for autonomy/rationality. In this contribution, I provide a summarizing statement of my position and articulate some reasons why I believe it should be considered philosophically defensible. Of particular interest, I argue that it is able to account for certain human rights better than three other conceptions of human dignity prominent in the African tradition, viz., the views that we have dignity in virtue of our vitality, moral behaviour, or capacity to care for others.
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Notes
- 1.
One scholar would have us look beyond written texts by philosophers to learn about human dignity (Afolayan 2016). While I agree that, say, popular culture can provide insights into dignity, in this essay I am interested in a normative theoretical approach to it, that is, whether a certain comprehensive account of what confers a dignity on us is justified, particularly in the light of its explanatory power with regards to certain intuitive human rights. For that project, philosophical texts are of most use.
- 2.
The concern about both is insufficient egalitarian standing—what about those who are not members of a given species or community? Intuitively, non-members, such as persons who are not humans, could have a dignity.
- 3.
I do not address here the criticism of this approach recently voiced by Ebert (2020), mainly since it applies to many conceptions of human dignity, not just mine.
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Metz, T. (2023). Defending a Communal Account of Human Dignity. In: Molefe, M., Allsobrook, C. (eds) Human Dignity in an African Context. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37341-1_2
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