Dignity

Dignity is a property relation. What a person owns is their own inner circles of self, and dignity is that ownership being preserved rather than transferred, which makes it something that can be taken by a specific mechanism rather than something felt or conferred. Integrity and strength follow from the ownership rather than accompanying it. The contrast Marsh draws is with honour, which she calls an endosocial term because it is a hierarchical measure of approval, held by a group and awarded or withdrawn by it. Someone who would murder their daughter to save their honour could not be said to have a healthy membrane, since a membrane that resilient and permeable is built from relationships rather than from standing. Honour is what an endoself has where an exoself has dignity. Loss of dignity is therefore a transfer with a recipient. Removal of privacy and will from people to corporations and algorithms is a transference of dignity, and destruction of personal membranes and boundaries is a key feature of prisons, many schools, most jobs and the bureaucratic handling of people by states. The same pattern operates on the famous, who face attacks on appearance, reputation and relationships along with violations of privacy, all of which are attacks on the innermost circle of self and all of which are tools of sublation. The corollary matters in a confrontation. Aggression that fails to take dignity leaves the aggressor without it instead.

Dignity is a foundational term in human rights law, appearing in the first article of the Universal Declaration and in the German Basic Law as inviolable, and Kantian ethics grounds it in rational agency, the idea that persons have dignity rather than price and must never be treated merely as means. Anthropology and sociology have long studied honour cultures, and Peter Berger argued that modern societies replaced honour with dignity as their organizing concept. Marsh arrives at a similar contrast by a different route. Where Berger describes a historical shift and Kant an inherent status, she makes dignity a possession that can be held or lost through identifiable operations, which turns an inviolable attribute into something with a mechanism of theft.