What Is Human Dignity?
Where does it come from? How do we know it exists? Observations.
An Opening Question
Tom Beaudoin in Consuming Faith: Integrating Who We Are with What We Buy (2003):
…‘human dignity’ and ‘mystery’ can easily ossify into buzzwords. We continually have to find evocative ways of describing dignity and mystery. I propose that we ask ourselves what is that undomesticatable region of ourselves that cannot be bought, cannot be branded? What about us cannot be traded away, drugged up, or dieted off? What about ourselves cannot be sold, sweated away, or co-opted by an advertiser? How would you describe that dimension of yourself, and what might it mean to live from that ‘place’ in your economic life?
I think of one of coaching’s most “powerful questions”: What won’t you settle for?
Humility or Pride?
Rabbi Nilton Bonder, in Our Immoral Soul, suggested that dignity is some sort of tension between humility and pride. “No one is naked unless he or she is aware of it. A great paradox,” he wrote, “is that we cannot claim dignity unless we are truly aware of our nudity — yet nothing challenges our dignity more than the realization that we are naked.”
