Abstract
Existing concepts of dignity struggle when applied to political practice. Dignity is assumed to be something intrinsic, insufficiently conceptualized, or overextended. Different accounts highlight important dimensions of dignity yet often conflate ontological grounding (what dignity is) with realization (how dignity is realized in political practice). As a result, disputes about dignity’s meaning are frequently framed as disagreements about its essence when they concern instead how dignity is specified and operationalized in political practice. This article contributes a conceptual architecture that shows how dignity functions as a political concept, clarifying which uses are coherent. Separating conceptual levels, the article shows that different accounts are not necessarily incompatible but operate at different levels. This reframing allows to evaluate dignity claims more precisely and to diagnose when appeals to dignity mask disagreement rather than conceptual incoherence.
Prominence and vagueness of dignity
Human dignity has made quite a “career” (Misztal, 2013), with several avenues of research focusing on its nominal traits as well as practical implications. For example, dignity came to be known as the justification of the meanings and practices of constitutions (McCrudden, 2021b; Moyn, 2014; Shulztiner and Carmi, 2014; Weinrib, 2016) or its reference in the global moral language of human rights (Kretzmer and Klein, 2002; Rosen, 2018: 1–2). Despite its prominence, dignity lacks a clear political conceptualization. This is perplexing because more than any other concept, dignity comes close to being a “universal social good” (Schachter, 1983: 849). However, becoming a universal good, utilizing ideational attribution or conceptual stretching, leads to weak empirical evidence. This article argues that separating what dignity is from how dignity is realized and the connection between the two relocate many disputes into tractable debates about mechanisms and the institutional design. The payoff for political theory is to identify which arguments matter at different conceptual levels and how to evaluate dignity claims in political practice.
This is important because political theory neglects to acknowledge that dignity purports to be an ethical and thus political, not just a descriptive, concept (Debes, 2009: 61). While critical scholarship has analyzed dignity as a contested, institutionally mediated, and often instrumentalized category, political theory has not yet developed a systematic conceptual architecture. Such an architecture specifies how dignity operates across different levels of political practice, distinguishing between disputes about dignity’s ontological grounding, its normative specification, and its institutional realization. This gap matters because without such an architecture, appeals to dignity lack criteria for evaluation, making it difficult to determine whether a given invocation is coherent, appropriately calibrated, or merely rhetorical. As Shklar (2023 [1992]: 293) observes, “[w]ith only a universal preference for life and some notion of human dignity taken for granted, it is by no means clear how to decide between apparently equally valid claims.” Clarifying the conceptual architecture of dignity is therefore essential for political judgment (Bird, 2021; Harrison, 2024).
The article develops a three-level account of dignity to adjudicate conflicts among competing dignity claims, showing that apparent contradictions often dissolve once claims are situated at the appropriate level. Rather than proposing a new moral theory, the article offers a methodological procedure for political judgment; identifying the conceptual level of a dignity claim; determining whether it concerns (ontological) grounding, normative specification, or (ontic) institutionalization; and applying the corresponding justificatory standard to guide policy and institutional design.
Drawing on Goertz’s (2006, 2020) framework of basic, secondary, and indicator dimensions, and combining it with Mouffe’s (2005) ontological/ontic distinction, the article separates dignity’s grounding from its political manifestations. In this framework, the ontological dimension spans both the basic and the secondary levels. The former establishes dignity’s existence, while the latter specifies its constitutive features. The ontic dimension corresponds to the indicator level, where dignity is institutionalized. Different levels perform different functions. The basic level establishes the existence of dignity as a property of human beings, whereas the second level specifies how this property is interpreted and operationalized. This architecture shows that disagreements do not necessarily concern dignity’s essence. Disagreements rather arise from conflating conceptual levels or embedding unacknowledged assumptions about how dignity should be realized. In other words, the architecture reveals that disputes are often contests over institutional mechanisms. For example, the contrast between rank-based and intrinsic-worth accounts concerns not dignity as a property but its operationalization. While the framework does not eliminate normative conflict, it relocates it from foundational disagreement to questions of design. Doing so enables political theory to identify conceptual stretching, clarify how different appeals to dignity function, and specify the grounds on which dignity can guide political judgment.
The article proceeds in five steps. First, I show why existing discussions do not provide a concept capable of evaluating practices. Second, I reconstruct the shifts from status-based dignity to Kantian intrinsic worth and contemporary rights-based accounts, clarifying how these transformations generated the conceptual ambiguities political theory inherits. Third, I develop a framework for conceptualizing dignity by combining Goertz’s model of concepts with Mouffe’s distinction between the ontological and the ontic. Fourth, I apply this framework to three illustrative cases, selected to test the architecture under different forms of political mediation: Catholic personalism, the United Nations’ (UN’s) humanitarian–legal usage, and critical global pluralism. Taken together, these cases illustrate that the conceptualization travels across distinct political contexts rather than merely reorganizing an intellectual genealogy. Finally, it shows that the framework enables clearer evaluation of policies, institutions, and justificatory claims while avoiding vagueness and exclusionary (mis-)use.
Conceptual disarray
The following shows that the difficulties existing approaches encounter are the result of failing to distinguish what dignity is from how dignity functions at different levels. Identifying this gap is what motivates the framework developed in the next section because few approaches to dignity can escape the fact that they focus on dignity’s attributes. Human rights, for example, are a consequence of a specific characterization of dignity, but they are not, in and of themselves, the essence of dignity. Certainly, there is a strong argument that what dignity lacks is a “well-defined core of meaning” (Rosen, 2014: 153). Yet, this is the analytical problem. Its ambiguity and lack of clarity and a definitive meaning suggests that it is not a fundamental concept. In the following, I focus on dignity as a concept rather than a phrase. Focusing on a phrase is confusing because different people mean different things by it. In relation, much of the literature focuses on dignity as something intrinsic to humans rather than an attribute of them (McCrudden, 2021a: 430) or distinguishes between naturalist and conventional takes on dignity (Perry, 2025).
Existing approaches focus on either the intrinsic parts of the concept or its attributes. Yet while this distinction aims to generate analytical clarity, both formations suffer from deficiencies, confusing intrinsic parts and the concept’s attributes. In this regard, the history of conceptualizing dignity shows a shift from status and honor to the Kantian purification of the concept into intrinsic moral worth (on the problematic use of historical concepts of dignity, see also Sensen, 2011). While Kant’s formulation made dignity universalizable, it also severed the concept from its empirical and political grounding (e.g. Bird, 2021; Killmister, 2017). Making this move explicit clarifies why political theory inherits a concept that is normatively ambitious and structurally weak.
There are at least three established strands approaching dignity: as status, as an intrinsic value, and as something dignified (Rosen, 2018: 40). All stress dignity’s role as a value (Killmister, 2017, 2020; McCrudden, 2014a: 2). Building on Lasswell and MacDougal (1992), Mattson and Clark (2011: 310), for example, propose a conception of human dignity in value terms, framing it “as a subjective experience organized around values,” based on individual experiences. This framing illustrates, for example, why identity politics stress the individual experience or why the call for universal rights rests on assumptions of dignity. Dignity, however, has always also been connected to status and honor (Rosen, 2018: 11). Only in the last two centuries did dignity come to be seen as something that refers to an intrinsic value attributed to all humans, and as carving out recognition by others (Neuman, 2014: 638).
The foundation of this assumption of dignity being referred to as an intrinsic value goes back to Immanuel Kant (2012: 46–48), acknowledging that humans have intrinsic value because their humanity makes them capable of morality. Kant’s concept of dignity qua humanity is important in another way. For example, dignity “purports to identify the existence of a kind of moral community between humans, the ‘membership’ of which is unearned and normatively privileged” (Debes, 2017: 209). With Kant, it became possible to equate dignity with human dignity and dignity with equality (Rosen, 2018: 31; see also Bayefsky, 2013). Kant’s abstraction of intrinsic moral value disconnected it from political practice. Nonetheless, dignity became a prominently invoked argument for human rights, and autonomy became the dominant post-Kantian specification of dignity’s grounding (Howard and Donnelly, 1986: 816; Rosen, 2018: 5).
For example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) presents dignity as the foundation of rights, grounding the document’s normative authority in universal worth. It thus resembles the overlap that dignity is shared by all humans (Schlink, 2014: 634), assumed to have obvious meanings (Bennett, 2016: 1). Certainly, dignity’s role in human rights seems to be to “supply a value, or a set of values, that other approaches do not.” Yet still, those who drafted the Declaration of Human Rights “failed to agree on any single foundation” (McCrudden, 2014b: 2). Rather, the UDHR’s appeal to dignity functions at the ontological level. It identifies a foundational value without clarifying the mechanisms through which this value should guide political judgment or institutional practice. This abstraction has enabled endorsement, but it also obscures the conceptual work required to translate dignity into political criteria for evaluating policies, rights claims, or forms of treatment. For example, already in the first sentence of the UDHR’s Preamble, dignity justifies the rest of the document.
Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world (United Nations, 1948).
Two traits thus define the contemporary dignity discourse: its foundational role for rights and its inherence in all human beings. This is no coincidence as Jacques Maritain, a Catholic philosopher, played a key role in drafting the UN Declaration, shaping its invocation of dignity by his political theology (e.g. Maritain, 1998: 148–50; see also Moyn, 2010; Vatter, 2013). I will return to this relationship in the final section, probing the conceptualization proposed here in the context of critical theory’s take on human rights. For now, dignity cannot be dependent on others, specific contexts, or other variables. Rather, it is an essential take on a description of what constitutes dignity; being human among equals (see also Etinson, 2020). Therefore, dignity, indeed, has an absolutist resonance to it (Rosen, 2018: 70; see also Debes, 2009: 47).
In contrast to the UDHR, the Third Geneva Convention embeds dignity at the indicator level by specifying concrete practices—humiliating, degrading, or dehumanizing treatment—that are categorically prohibited, mainly in the sense of “a requirement that people . . . should be treated respectfully” (Rosen, 2018: 59–60; see also Etinson, 2020: 378–79). Unlike the UDHR’s ontological formulation, the Geneva Convention operationalizes dignity through enforceable standards of conduct in wartime, thereby providing a clearer account of what it means to protect or violate dignity in practice. This contrast illustrates how different conceptual levels of dignity, foundational worth versus concrete treatment, shape the way political institutions understand and apply the term. Regarding prisoners of war, Article 3, for example, stipulates that those specific acts “are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place,” in particular: (a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; (b) taking of hostages; (c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.
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Dignity’s levels thus resist both absolutist universalism and conceptual settlement. 2 Any substantive conception remains in flux. The connection between human rights and dignity, then, needs arguments, not assumptions (McCrudden, 2014b: 10). Certainly, the possession of rights might be a symptom of the concept and thus illustrate that those other symptoms (e.g. respect or equality) are not part of the concept in itself. However, as in the case of rights, they can be something that constitutes what dignity is. The need to convincingly argue for or debunk a relationship with dignity is not only the case for human rights. It is also the case for other relationships and functions, such as the judgment of political conduct. These accounts operate at different conceptual levels, mistaking disputes about specification and realization for disputes about essence.
Conceptualizing dignity
This section develops the conceptual architecture by setting out the conceptual levels and the ontological–ontic distinction, illustrating how levels can be operationalized and applying the framework to examples that test its evaluative purchase. The conceptualization is based on Goertz’s (2006, 2020) definition of concepts, equating a successful definition with the identification of attributes that provide necessary and sufficient conditions for locating examples of the phenomenon itself (Gerring, 1999: 363). Concepts, in this view, “are theories about ontology: they are theories about the fundamental constitutive elements of a phenomenon” (Goertz, 2006: 5).
To complete building this conceptualization, I rely on Mouffe’s distinction between the ontic and the ontological. Politics is about ontics, that is, “the manifold practices of conventional politics.” The ontological “concerns the very way in which society is instituted” (Mouffe, 2005: 8–9). Ontics, in other words, is about political practices that rely on the ontological. Answering the semantic part of a concept’s core (“what is”), therefore, does not constitute in itself something ontic (e.g. a political convention or practice). However, it provides a necessary condition for that practice. This distinction clarifies how dignity operates. Ontological grounding (e.g. human worth or autonomy) enables ontic practices (constitutional protections, rights enforcement). The significance of this distinction is not merely classificatory. It allows to diagnose where debates about dignity go astray. For example, critics arguing that dignity is too abstract to guide practice target ontological formulations while evaluating them by ontic standards. Conversely, when defenders infer specific institutional arrangements from ontological worth, they collapse levels that require further normative argument.
Before proceeding, a disclaimer is in order. Any concept relies on interpretations that help formulate hypotheses (Drysdale, 1996: 80). This clarifies what is at stake in political debates and theories involving dignity and is attentive to Sartori’s (1970: 1035) warning of “conceptual stretching.” Moreover, it helps to avoid falling into the trap of focusing on nominal characteristics of dignity, assumed to be essential in the sense of being a necessary condition. For example, a change in dignity from a religious to a secular concept (i.e. a nominal trait) on the inherent worth of the person does not change the kind of dignity (as the examples in the final section illustrate as well). The essence is still the worth of the human person. That is to say, if the outcome remains the same, for example, the integrity of the body. However, removing the “human” in human dignity fundamentally alters the concept because then there is no ground for the inherent worth of the person qua being human.
There might be particular conditions associated with dignity (in this case, humans), but these are attributes of the concept rather than its causal building blocks. Certainly, this approach runs against the naturalistic conceptions of dignity, not relying on being human as such, but relying on some property that humans tend to possess (e.g. personhood). Relying on “the human” seems speciesist. Yet the reliance on an elusive notion of “the human” in human dignity restricts the concept of humans alone and remains vague and poorly defended (Perry, 2026). Building a concept this way also opens up hitherto neglected avenues to identify the concept’s empirical referents. This take on concepts is revealing because it stresses the constitutive characteristics of the concept and its causal powers rather than a mere semantic analysis (Goertz, 2006: 5).
According to Goertz (2006: 6), there are three levels of a concept. The basic level, “the noun to which we attach adjectives,” is used in theoretical propositions. In this case, “dignity” and “human dignity.” On this basic level, it is obvious that we are talking about human dignity. The second level forms the ontological analysis of concepts, that is, the mechanisms involved. For example, human dignity consists of the worth humans attribute to their humanity, a universalistic claim. 3 The second level is ontological in a weak sense. It specifies the constitutive features through which dignity is interpreted, but unlike the basic level, it does not establish dignity’s existence. It mediates between grounding and practice by providing normative specifications that require further justification. The third level is the indicator, data, or operational level, that is, the specific data that can be gathered to categorize the concept. For example, various constitutions invoke human dignity as both the cause of and worth to defend constitutions or the arguments that human dignity necessitates human rights (Kretzmer and Klein, 2002; Łuków, 2018; Moyn, 2014).
Table 1 maps the three conceptual levels onto the ontological–ontic distinction. The basic level captures the claim that dignity is a feature of human beings and supplies the normative foundation for rights and non-derogable protections. The second level identifies the mechanisms that translate groundings into reasons for action; this is where many disputes occur. The indicator (ontic) row lists the empirical, policy-level manifestations through which dignity is realized, contested, or violated. This illustrates how dignity operates simultaneously as an ontological claim, an interpretive normative framework, and a set of ontic indicators. This allows disagreements about dignity to be located at different levels rather than treated as disputes about a single concept. The table does not display a hierarchy in which higher levels determine lower ones, but as a mapping of analytically distinct dimensions that must be connected through argument rather than assumptions.
Levels of dignity and the ontological–ontic distinction.
The causal mechanisms involved in a concept imply that there are also non-causal ontological components of a concept, particularly at the basic and secondary-level dimensions. These dimensions are not causes but constitute what the phenomenon in question is (Goertz, 2006: 15, 2020: 215). For example, one might take the view that human rights are not a symptom (i.e. a consequence) of human dignity, but rather something that constitutes what dignity is. Yet, a close look at the causal mechanisms reveals that it would be wrong to confuse the symptoms with what the concept is. Like a disease, that causes symptoms, the symptoms are not the disease (Goertz, 2020: 9). Therefore, if we hear and believe that we treat humans equally and respectfully because of their dignity or human worth (Giselsson, 2012; Nussbaum, 2011a: 30–31), this says nothing about what dignity is. However, it may indicate what grounds equal respect, without defining dignity itself.
Building a concept starts with the premise that concepts should be as value-free as possible, excluding certain elements. However, the concept in question here, by definition, invokes values and attributions of evaluation. As with several other political concepts (e.g. freedom, power, justice, etc.), they are also about ethical evaluation (Carter, 2015: 283). Because of this inherent tension and premises, the following distinguishes between the concept of dignity that delimits its characteristics and the discourses about its value, legitimacy, purpose, and so on, within different contexts. The next section thus first outlines the architecture of a concept, followed by three illustrative examples.
Levels and strands of dignity
The basic level is often the most controversial one because “it is the dependent variable under scrutiny” and the basis for theorizing. Building the basic level should involve the following four steps (Goertz, 2006: 30, 6, 35). (1) “Explicitly analyze the negative pole.” Concepts “often come in pairs, one of which is seen as the ‘negation’ or ‘opposite’ of the other” (Goertz, 2020: 20). Problems of conceptualization begin here because the negative pole of dignity depends on the terms’ nominal definition. For example, if we take common definitions of dignity, dignity is either a “formal reserve or seriousness of manner, appearance, or language,” what many call the dignitarian virtue (e.g. Gilabert, 2024), or “the quality or state of being worthy, honored, or esteemed” or “high rank, office, or position” or “a legal title of nobility or honor.” 4 Adding the common notion of possessing (inherent) value, we get corresponding negative poles (see Table 2).
Positive and negative poles of dignity.
Apparently, no common negative pole of dignity exists, other than different ones depending on the nominal definition. If we take the definition of dignity, the quality or state of being worthy, honored, or esteemed, it becomes obvious that dignity is a relational concept, as all these qualities depend on others. 5 What adds to this relational quality is that it also seems there is no common positive pole. Relational dignity presupposes recognition by others, which Kant’s concept excludes. Only if other qualities provide a standard to measure things can dignity be said to be a concept of someone worthy, honored, or esteemed. These relational features depend on a variety of contexts. If we want to have a definitive concept of dignity, then it might only be a stable concept in a given period at best (see also Bird, 2021: 14–15). There might be timeless assumptions of what is honorable, such as, for example, the results of certain virtues (e.g. MacIntyre, 1984). However, the fact remains that there is a continuum between the positive and negative poles of what is honorable. As concepts of social status and honor have often been the main angle of dignity (Rosen, 2018: 11), we need to (2) “Theorize the underlying continuum between the negative and positive poles.”
If we turn back to UDHR’s take on dignity, its claim that dignity is inherent to humans qua humans rests on the assumption that dignity is inseparable from its carriers—human beings. Without such carriers, there would be no meaningful negative pole against which violations could be recognized, reinforcing the view that inherence functions as a necessary condition. Yet, as with other concepts that appear to have clear positive and negative poles, the gray zone between them is “often left unconceptualized as the middle part of the continuum” (Goertz, 2020: 81). The history of human dignity illustrates the importance of theorizing these gray zones. For example, the positive pole—“a high quality of being worthy”—and the negative pole—“a low quality of worthiness”—have long been shaped by shifting hierarchies of status (e.g. Waldron, 2012), demonstrating that dignity has not been equally distributed even when its inherence is asserted. Critical theorists show that these exclusions are not merely anomalies but structural features of political orders that have historically denied full recognition to particular groups (e.g. Mills, 2017; Pateman, 2018; Sala-Molins, 2006; Stovall, 2021).
Thus, while a fixed continuum may be difficult to identify at the level of human dignity as a universal value, in political practice, a continuum re-emerges. Human beings can be marginalized, dehumanized, or treated as if they do not possess the dignity the UDHR presumes to be inherent. 6 This tension between conceptual poles, historical exclusions, and lived gray zones is what a political concept of dignity must be able to diagnose. For example, although “dignity” has prominently been used in an un-egalitarian notion by the Catholic Church in the 19th century (e.g. Łuków, 2018: 4), this has gradually changed toward all people. Waldron (2012) argues that the concept of human dignity needs to be captured in legal terms and legal recognition. The institution of slavery and the treatment of Native Americans seem to confirm these suggestions. For example, the U.S. Constitution, resting on a politics of identity, “for purposes of representation, counted some Americans as worth three-fifths of other” (Lepore, 2018: 701), attributing “full” dignity only to a partial group. Despite the idealistic notions of human dignity of all people, it has never been exclusively a genuinely continuous or dichotomous concept. Some have always been considered worthy, some less, and some not at all. At the same time, these considerations have always changed over time and in a different context in either direction. It is therefore (3) necessary not to “let the empirical distribution of cases influence many decisions” (Goertz, 2006: 35).
To avoid presuming empirical distributions, it is necessary to be clear about the secondary level of dignity because it tackles the question of how the various dimensions are “‘combined’ to arrive at the basic-level concept.” The second level is the “structural glue that binds the secondary-level dimensions together to form the basic level” (Goertz, 2006: 7). To illustrate these conditions, I continue with the above-introduced example of dignity (i.e. the basic level) as resting on the secondary level of “high quality of being worthy” (see Table 3). A necessary and sufficient condition, then, would be a particular and widely shared understanding of social status. At this point, it becomes clear that the basic and the secondary-level dimensions “are not causes but constitute what the phenomenon is” (Goertz, 2006: 15); they are ontological properties of the concept. Yet still, as we have seen earlier as well, these “necessary” conditions can change.
Human dignity on three levels.
In this case, a recognition of different indicators (i.e. the third level) of high quality of being is not a symptom of human dignity (assuming that the highest social status attributes dignity) but constitutes what human dignity is. Reading concepts this way illustrates how important it is not only to point out the effects of phenomena. Just as important, it shows the need to look closely at the causes of the effects. In Table 3, the relationship between the secondary and the basic level is an ontological one, whereas the relationship between the third and second is one of indicators. This is a conceptual typology, which is ontological and definitional rather than causal (Goertz, 2020: 215). That means the indicators do not cause the next levels but are “of” human dignity; they are symptoms, of the disease, and not the disease. In other words, social status (e.g. based on rank) functions as an “indicator of” the relationship with the secondary dimension (e.g. high quality and worth of being). The secondary level is, thus, in this case, about “defining or constitutive features or attributes” (Goertz, 2020: 29) but not “necessary” (“if-then”) conditions.
This distinction clarifies, for example, why rank-based accounts that universalize high status and intrinsic worth emphasize moral personhood need not disagree about dignity’s basic level. They differ in how the secondary mechanisms are specified and in how dignity is institutionalized. What seems to be a dispute about dignity’s essence may instead be a dispute about its realization. The following illustrates the inevitability of juggling different conceptual strands and the wider conceptual framework involved. What is pointed out below has its place in the semantics–ontology strand, yet is at the same time influenced by the other parts. Doing so illustrates that semantics (the question of “what is,” i.e., what I established with the examples above and the ones to follow below) should not be merely driven by pure “meaning” (Goertz, 2020: 13). Causation, normative issues, and descriptions also influence them. Moreover, it illustrates that numeric measurements are variables, not indicators. Indicators would point to the ontic aspects, whereas concepts are about ontologies (Goertz, 2020: 13, 8).
Take, for example, influential accounts that understand dignity as the qualification of rank or the emphasis of dignity as something intrinsic, or relational (e.g. Rosen, 2018; Waldron, 2012; Zylberman, 2016, 2025). Their disagreement relates to the basic level of the concept (e.g. status or intrinsic worth, cf. Table 2). Yet once the disagreement is reconstructed using the three levels, the terms shift. At the basic level, both strands affirm dignity as a universal normative property. The divergence emerges at the secondary level, where both specify the constitutive mechanism differently, relying on indicator-level institutionalization. Either they are pointing to legal recognition, rights, and civic equality, or they invoke prohibitions on humiliation, degrading treatment, and instrumentalization as institutional manifestations of intrinsic worth. In practice, both approaches require political and legal translation to give dignity a concrete meaning. This suggests that the disagreement is, at least in part, about the mediating mechanism that connects ontological grounding to ontic practice. The apparent disagreement dissolves at the basic level. Both strands, for example, reject humiliation (based on the secondary level), and the dispute concerns whether legal rank-equalization is constitutive of dignity or a mechanism through which intrinsic worth is protected, not the essence of dignity.
The conceptualization of dignity, as proposed here, then, demonstrates that its focus shifts as it emphasizes the specification of the secondary level that mediates between ontological claims and the demands of political practice. Political theory can evaluate competing dignity claims and alter the dialectic based on a better insight into competing dignity claims. For example, what appears to be a disagreement about dignity’s essence may instead distract from more substantive disputes, such as the institutional translation of dignity into law and policy. Identifying the level at which a claim operates helps to gain criteria for assessing whether appeals to dignity illuminate political judgment or merely obscure underlying normative disputes.
The framework can reorganize theoretical disputes, such as over rank and intrinsic moral or transcendent worth. What it does not yet show is whether the architecture holds when dignity is embedded in concrete institutional settings, where ontological groundings are tied to specific traditions; where secondary mechanisms are contested by actors with unequal power; and where indicator-level realizations carry distributive consequences. The following cases are selected to test these conditions. Catholic personalism tests what happens when ontological grounding is theologically specified; the UN case tests how dignity operates when institutionalized as a symbol across global order, and the critical global pluralism case tests whether the framework can diagnose dignity claims made under conditions of structural inequality and colonial legacy. Each applies the same three-level architecture, and each produces a different verdict about where the relevant disagreement lies.
Catholic Church
Given the history of conceptualizing human dignity, the Catholic case is instructive for a reason that goes beyond historical genealogy. It illustrates how an ontological grounding embedded in a specific theological tradition, one that played a direct role in shaping the UDHR through theological influence, is presented as universal. The framework developed here makes this move visible. When ontological grounding is theologically specific, the secondary mechanism it generates constrains institutional realization in ways that are not always transparent in public justification. What the Catholic case shows is not merely a historical curiosity but a structural pattern, the embedding of particular metaphysical commitments within ostensibly universal dignity claims. The global pluralism case will later identify these universal claims at the level of international institutions.
The Catholic Church defines “the dignity of the human person” as “rooted in his creation in the image and likeness of God . . . Human beings make their own contribution to their interior growth . . .” (Vatican, 1993: #1700). 7 Dignity’s focus on the person is important because, first, as the Catholic definition stresses, the dignity of the human person gives rise to “specific moral requirements.” This is obvious in the definition, which reiterates this point—“being freely to direct himself to this fulfillment” (Vatican, 1993: #1700). Second, personalism, per the Catholic definition of dignity, is absolutist, that is, dignity is only possible qua personhood. Table 4 shows the reduction of the Catholic description of dignity into the three-level conceptual framework.
The Catholic concept of dignity.
This case illustrates the problems with necessary and sufficient conditions. The Catholic concept shows how ontological grounding, the image and likeness of God, produces a secondary mechanism that constrains institutional realization. The framework reveals that disagreement with this account is not necessarily about dignity’s existence but about the appropriateness of its ontological grounding for political orders. What is more, the Catholic case demonstrates that once ontological grounding is specified in theological terms, the secondary mechanism constrains institutional realization. In political orders, the question is therefore not whether dignity exists, but whether a particular ontological grounding can legitimately serve as a basis for public justification. The framework clarifies that rejection of this account targets its secondary-level specification, not the basic-level affirmation of human dignity.
United Nations
As suggested earlier, “the idea of dignity reflects sociohistorical conceptions of basic rights and freedoms” (Schachter, 1983: 853), rather than generating them. This is no different in the invocation of “human dignity” in the UN Charter’s Preamble, setting out “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” 8 From the prominent mention of human dignity in the Charter, we should not, however, infer any shared particular purpose. Nonetheless, as others have pointed out, understood as a symbol, human dignity also implies “that rights are not derived from the state or any other external authority” (Schachter, 1983: 853).
If we take as a working hypothesis that human dignity in the Charter’s Preamble functions as a “philosophical statement,” expressed as a symbol, it makes sense that the various attributions are to be understood as variables, not indicators. For example, in the case of the UN, this “philosophical statement” symbolized by human dignity resembles the discourse over humanitarianism, human rights, and legalization (Mazower, 2013: 380). This is especially because a variable is a property that takes on different values (see Table 5). Dignity operates as a symbolic value whose institutional realization is contingent and variable, demonstrating the need for a political concept that mediates between ontological claims and concrete practices.
Human dignity in the UN Charter.
In a rather disenchanted view of legal measures, power, and the quest of the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, for example, concluded that to take the quest for human dignity seriously, change must come through political solutions (i.e. via a focus on ontics). Humanitarian assistance alone “will never be the solution” (Ban, 2016: para. 27). Such a view acknowledges that human dignity has a “wide range of applications outside of the sphere of human rights” (Schachter, 1983: 854). On the issue of migrants, the UN Secretary-General, for example, grounds the legitimation for humanitarian assistance and political solutions in a turn toward an individual identification with the refugee. Their “concern” and “daily struggles” must become ours (Ban, 2016: para. 19). International politics, after all, is not only a struggle over power but also over legitimacy (e.g. Franck, 1990). Yet legitimacy is itself a matter of meaning, built around concepts such as human dignity.
For example, appeals to dignity authorize and legitimize interventions, legal regimes, humanitarian practices, or calls for global justice and reconciliation (e.g. Hicks, 2011; Quataert, 2011). The present framework clarifies that such invocations operate primarily at the indicator level, where institutional arrangements are justified as expressions of universal worth. The architecture developed here enables political theory to distinguish between affirming dignity’s ontological grounding and contesting the institutional forms through which that grounding is globalized. This distinction prevents both moral relativism and institutional dogmatism.
It is no coincidence that different approaches to explaining policies based on “humanity” can claim to speak in the name of human dignity because they take as starting points different conditions of the concept’s secondary level. In other words, they argue for something in the service of human dignity if a certain number of conditions exist. This is obvious in the difference between what the third level is doing in the Catholic and the UN examples. For the Catholic concept, the third level seems to be a way of realizing the second level, so what it is to be “in the image of God” is to act in conformity with the good. In contrast, for the UN concept, the third level seems to be what is owed to humans by the second level, implying that because of our worth as persons, individuals are entitled to human rights and ought to be treated humanely.
Critical global pluralist perspectives
To test whether the proposed architecture can be applied across political contexts beyond historical lineage and geographic scope, it is instructive to examine approaches that call for reframing the global human rights discourse around dignity. Approaches in the realm of critical international theory (e.g. Benhabib and Jurkevics, 2018; Shapcott, 2010) that focus on global pluralism do not simply add another interpretation of dignity. Rather, they challenge the indicator-level institutional mediation through which dignity has been globalized, while leaving its ontological grounding intact. In this regard, critical theorists asked to “accommodate perspectives from both the Global North and the Global South,” contending that “the global norms order has to shift its emphasis from a saturated and frequently misused human rights language to a more pluralist yet emancipatory language of human dignity” (Regilme, 2019: 287; 280; see also Benhabib, 2013; Regilme, 2022). Invoking dignity, it is suggested, places both North and South on equal terms, redirecting the debate toward political structures and institutional design rather than abstract moral claims. Legitimacy, in this perspective, depends on pluralistic and deliberative institutions that enable collective participation in constructing and defending normative standards (see also Nascimento and Lutz-Bachmann, 2018).
This perspective challenges the equation of dignity with rights. When reconstructed through the conceptual architecture developed here, however, the disagreement shifts levels. At the basic level, there is no rejection of the dignity of the human person. At the second level, dignity is specified in terms of equal moral standing, non-domination, and self-determination. The contestation arises at the indicator level, where the global human rights regime is criticized as embedded in asymmetrical power structures and inadequate as a mediating institutional mechanism (e.g. Hopgood, 2015; Moyn, 2018). This perspective challenges the equation of dignity with rights. However, when reconstructed through the conceptual architecture here, the disagreement appears differently. At the basic level, the framework suggests no rejection of the dignity of the human person. On the other side, at the second level, dignity denotes equal moral standing and protection against domination or exclusion.
Debates on the Right to Development illustrate this contestation over dignity (e.g. Salomon, 2007; Sengupta, 2002). In the West, dignity has been framed mainly through civil and political rights enforceable by individuals (e.g. Moyn, 2017). Perspectives on and from the Global South have argued that structural economic exclusion constitutes a violation of dignity, not least because human rights “preceed law and are not derived from law but from the concept of human dignity” (Sengupta, 2002: 859–60). Reconstructed through the framework here, the dispute over dignity does not primarily concern its basic level but whether prevailing indicators and their arrangement (e.g. liberal individual political rights) can realize dignity under conditions of structural inequality.
Table 6 clarifies that this move does not deny dignity’s ontological grounding but, rather, contests whether existing indicator levels (e.g. the liberal rights legalization) adequately realize the second-level commitment to equal political standing in practice. What appears as a normative critique of dignity is thus more precisely a critique of how dignity is institutionalized in global politics. Challenged is thus not whether human beings possess worth (cf. Table 2), but whether the prevailing (e.g. rights) framework successfully translates that worth into emancipatory political arrangements. The architecture thus reveals that appeals to dignity in global politics are struggles over institutional mediation rather than disputes over human worth itself.
Global pluralism and human dignity.
Global pluralism’s diagnosis also resonates with broader reflections on global governance. As pointed out in the example of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s take on dignity, UN Secretary-Generals have been pursuing this notion of dignity all along. For example, they have stressed the UN’s universal membership or that the UN is about humanity rather than only states (e.g. Kille, 2007; Troy, 2021). Not least is the UN Charter open to global pluralism because it has the potential to “ground human dignity as a base of global governance [and] inheres in its aspirational intent and vision: a ‘One World’ [. . .] generated by and generative of forms of solidarity not restricted to nationalistic frameworks, though certainly inclusive of them” (Weinert, 2015: 79). These reflections underscore a central point of the present framework, that ontological affirmation does not determine institutional form. The translation from dignity’s grounding to its political realization is mediated and contestable.
Conclusion
What I have illustrated is a conceptualization of dignity that embraces, rather than attempts to eliminate, what has been described as its “capacity for inexhaustible meaning” (Hanvey, 2014: 228). The impossibility of settling the concept once and for all does not justify abandoning it. Its “inexhaustible meaning” rather underscores the need for closer attention. The epistemological point of departure here takes human dignity as contested (Rodriguez, 2015: 746). This means that no single definition can resolve its ambiguity, and that any appeal to dignity requires argumentation about how the concept is formed and operationalized. Without distinguishing the levels of the concept, dignity appears either vague or dogmatically overdetermined.
Once the levels are separated, political theory gains criteria for judgment. Disagreements can be identified as ontological (grounding), secondary (constitutive mechanisms), or indicator level (institutional realization). Certainly, the framework does not resolve normative conflict. But it clarifies where that conflict lies and what would count as a relevant argument at each level. Distinguishing levels allows us to identify when arguments fail because they address the wrong dimension. For example, when ontological assertions are used to settle disputes that concern institutional design, or when disputes framed as disagreements about dignity’s essence are in fact disagreements about its institutional and political mediation.
Approaching dignity as a political concept requires beginning with the form of the concept rather than with substantive essence. Political arguments inevitably rely on values, as the examples in the previous section illustrate. However, they also require conceptual clarity about how those values are constituted because the work of political judgment is “to select from among the truths accessible to us those that ought to be known” (Morgenthau, 1972: 11). In the case of dignity, this means clarifying which conceptual building blocks and levels are used and enabling dignity to guide and judge political conduct.
Contemporary applications of “dignity” make this need evident. For example, the UN Development Program’s 2022 Special Report draws on Nussbaum’s (2011a: 30–31; see also 2011b: 18–19) definition of dignity—respect, agency, and equality—to frame global threats to human security. The report argues that “dignity consists of being treated with respect. It also implies having control over what people are able to do. And it implies respecting the principle that all human beings are all equal” (United Nations Development Programme, 2022: 93). Yet even here, dignity functions both as a moral claim and as a political criterion. This illustrates how the concept shifts between ontological grounding (what dignity is) and ontic practices (how dignity is enacted or violated). Without distinguishing these levels, political appeals to dignity risk becoming either moralized or empty.
Precisely because dignity is used to guide and judge human conduct (Mattson and Clark, 2011: 304), a systematic conceptualization is indispensable. The aim is not to impose unity on a contested idea, but to establish a baseline from which arguments can proceed and against which political practices in different contexts can be assessed. To be sure, human dignity has long functioned as a reservoir of normative aspirations and competing interpretations, which explains why it has been stretched, moralized, and instrumentalized across political contexts. The framework developed here does not resolve normative disputes about dignity, but it alters the terrain on which they occur. The article has drawn on three theory-testing cases and does not exhaust the global diversity of dignity claims, which future work could address.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the ISA West Annual conference 2023 panelists, where this paper has been first presented, as well as Suzy Killmister, Matthew Perrey, Kristi Giselsson, and Rhoda Howard-Hassmann for valuable input while developing this paper.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.