Kant’s Concept of Dignity / ed. by Kato and Gerhard Schönrich. Berlin ; Boston : De Gruyter, 2020. 330 pages. ISBN 9783110661200. [KSEH 209]

This collection of essays, which are the outcome of a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research sponsored by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, appears nine years after Oliver Sensen’s seminal monograph Kant on Human Dignity (Berlin/Boston 2011), which, not surprisingly, is quoted in almost all of the essays. The scope of the endeavor is breathtaking. It sets off from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ clam that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” However, if dignity were a property bestowed on human beings by birth, dignity could never be lost. In the case of dangerous criminals, Kant expressed doubts about dignity as an inalienable property. Hence an exciting set of questions that serve as a guiding thread for the discussions: “Are human rights grounded in dignity, such that they can be derived directly from the concept of dignity? Or does dignity in and of itself provide reasons for human rights? Is there a connecting tie between and the legal sphere of human rights at all?” (p. 1) The first focus is on human rights. Kant’s words are carved in stone: “a human being regarded as a person, that is, as the subject of morally practical reason, is exalted above any price; for as a person (homo noumenon) he is not to be valued merely as a means to the ends of others or even to his own ends, but as an end in itself, that is, he possesses dignity (an absolute inner worth), by which he exacts respect for himself from all other rational beings in the world.” (MdS 6:434-43) However, a careful reading of Kant’s texts shows that he does not narrow the extension of the notion of dignity to the species homo sapiens alone. Hence the second focus is about questioning anthropocentrism, for any being that meets certain criteria of rational autonomy may be a bearer of dignity. Most interestingly, Kant’s notion of dignity is not limited to human beings but instead extends to all rational beings; e.g., Kant makes clear that there may even be super-personal bearers of dignity like the state. With much timeliness, Yasushi Kato and Gerhard Schönrich note that – contrary to all appearances – the phrase Menschheit in einer Person (MdS 6:435) might “not be restricted to properties owned only by a certain biological species,” because of its referring “to a cluster of properties and abilities like autonomy which may also be owned by non-human beings like angels, aliens or intelligent animals.” (p. 1) In sum, if it is true that Kant talks of human beings, it is also true that the extension of the notion applies to all rational beings. The first part of the volume points out tensions within the concept of dignity. Christoph Horn proposes both an absoluteness and a contingency reading of why Kant thinks that human dignity is not immediately, inherently, and persistently possessed by human beings (p. 11). On this point, Dieter Birnbacher argues that there are two avenues by which the notion of dignity comes to be applied to parts or the whole of the subhuman world. He calls one sentimental, the other legal. The former is rooted in Romanticism and ascribes dignity to nature in virtue of its grandeur, its sublimity, or its ultimate inscrutability; the latter maintains that not only humans but also some non-human entities have moral rights, with the implication that humans have vital moral duties towards these entities (p. 38). The paper by Gerhard Schönrich shows that Kant’s theory of value is based on the moral-neutral concept of rational autonomy “as a second order ability of an agent to set ends out of free will.” (p. 49) The second part considers dignity and human rights, with Reza Mosayebi laying out a formal account to be endorsed by a plurality of substantive conceptions of dignity in the context of human rights (p. 73), while Matthias Kettner proposes four conditions of adequacy for accounting for human dignity, thus setting the stage for constructing a “Kantian Dignity Semantics.” (p. 97) The moral implications of the concept of dignity are the subject matter of the third part. Saneyuki Yamatsuta starts from a passage from the Vorlesungen to argue that honor and dignity are connected and express moral qualities (Collins 27:377). The object of dignity and honor is not physical human life, but rather morality itself, which can even demand the sacrificing of life. “As in the premodern society one sacrificed his life for protecting his honor in a duel, he is now demanded to sacrifice his life for his dignity, i.e., morality.” (p. 131-132) In her paper, Susan Meld Shell explains that for Kant moral dignity is both elevation and unconditional value, i.e., an inner worth, although one that can be represented adequately only through negative reference to that which is “set infinitely above.” (p. 139) Dignity as “inner value” illustrates this interruption of self-love in terms of that which is beyond all calculation or “priceless,” in terms of an alternative rule of action that is internal to reason itself (GMS 4:428, 439). A “market price,” according to the common usage in Kant’s time, was the price that a seller could ordinarily expect from a buyer where the cost was not fixed by statute (GMS 4:434). As Oliver Sensen notes, Kant uses dignity in three different applications: first, to say that one being is elevated above others, e.g., the “dignity of a monarch” (SF 7:19), “the dignity of philosophy” (KrV B86), the “dignity of mathematics” (KrV B492), the “dignity of a teacher” (RGV 6:162); second, to express that human beings are elevated above the rest of nature in virtue of having freedom, “the dignity of human nature […] its freedom” (RGV 6:57n.); and third, to specify that moral worth is unconditional, i.e., infinitely raised above price (p. 164). The fourth part is about dignity as an end in itself. In his account of deliberation about moral principles inspired by Kant’s kingdom of ends, Thomas Hill shows that human dignity is not a metaphysical ground. It is instead a comprehensive status defined by basic moral principles and values (p. 177). Dieter Sturma reconstructs dignity as a dense concept with a long history in culture and philosophy, e.g., in Manetti and Rousseau (p. 195). “End in itself” and dignity pertain to human beings as rational and moral agents, whereby the former, Allen Wood maintains, refers to the kind of motive rational beings can have to obey a categorical imperative and is also the ground of specific moral duties. The latter, by contrast, refers to an incomparable worth that may not be sacrificed or exchanged for anything else. Kant identifies dignity with the authority of the moral law and the autonomy of the rational will. The dignity of rational nature makes humanity an end in itself, but, Wood concludes, what actually constitutes an end in itself is the rational capacity to set ends (p. 211). Finally, the fifth part looks into the social, political, and cultural dimensions of dignity. The framework of Kant’s sources in Pufendorf, Hobbes, Hume, and Pestalozzi is highlighted by Yasushi Kato (p. 231), while Karl Ameriks tackles Kant’s statements in connection with grave evils such as racism and anti-Semitism. Ameriks reconstructs the landscape of how Kant’s terms have been used over the centuries while insisting that the errors Kant and others made are not simply a matter of racism but should be understood as “rooted in a broader blindness about cultures…outside of his northern European Protestant background” (p. 261). Again, Katrin Flickschuh examines Kant’s designation of the state as a bearer of dignity in the Rechtslehre (MdS 6:319), which has been much neglected (p. 283), while Takuya Salto considers Kant’s patriotism, a concept that provides practical reasoning with what is needed to develop the idea of a republican constitution while protecting the rights of the human being through the legislation of the common will in the form of representative democracy (p. 303). In his Trading the Genome: Investigating the Commodification of Bio-Information (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), Broanwin Parry warned of the dangers associated with trading human cells. Today, the issues raised by the authors of this important book will have an impact that goes well beyond the boundaries of philosophy