Dignity, Recognition, and Illusions of Entitlement

I. THE METAPHYSICS OF DIGNITY: BEYOND NATURALISM AND CONVENTIONALISM

What’s the connection between dignity and recognition? Philosophers typically give two kinds of answers. The naturalist view is that dignity is an inherent and non-relational value property, only contingently connected to recognition. The conventionalist view is that dignity is a social, relational property, since recognition confers dignity. In this section, I introduce a relational alternative. Dignity is an inherently relational property directed to both interpersonal and social forms of recognition. I don’t attempt to show that the relational account is superior to the standard models, but, more modestly, I argue that the relational account promises to integrate key insights of both inherent and conferralist views.

Let’s start with three important clarifications. First, about the term “dignity.” Sometimes the term is used to refer to the condition or achievement of an agent, such as when we speak of an individual “dying or working with dignity.” But at other times we refer to a basic normative status of a kind of agent.¹ Our topic is the second form of dignity, which we may call “basic dignity.”

Second, to sharpen our focus on the nexus between dignity and recognition, I’ll bracket substantive issues about who has dignity; what features (if any)² ground dignity; and what specific requirements dignity generates.

And third about the term “recognition.” By “recognition” I don’t mean merely the acknowledgment in one’s thought of some property in another, but, more robustly, an attitude of respect manifested in one’s action and interaction with others.

We may now frame my guiding question more precisely: What’s the connection between basic dignity and recognition? Philosophers typically offer two types of answers.

Start with

Naturalism: basic dignity is an inherent and non-relational evaluative property that exists fully independently of recognition.

Such a view is often attributed to Immanuel Kant.³ For instance, as Samuel Kerstein puts it, human dignity is the status of “having unconditional, transcendent value.”⁴ Yet, Naturalism is not limited to Kantians. For (many) neo-Aristotelians, the value consists in the exercise of your basic capabilities.⁵ And for more broadly teleological theorists, it is the basic good of human nature.⁶ Regardless of differences, these views share commitment to a more general view of the structure of dignity, Naturalism: dignity is an intrinsic, non-relational value. Yet, if dignity exists fully independently of recognition, recognition is not necessary for the existence of dignity. Similarly, whether you’re measured makes no difference to your actual height, which, let’s suppose, is also an inherent and non-relational property.

However, Naturalism faces at least two important challenges concerning the nexus between dignity and recognition.

First, respect is not merely an attitude and a form of treatment, it’s also a directed duty, i.e., an obligation owed to the bearer of dignity. However, there’s a conceptual gap between the evaluative notion of (intrinsic) value and the deontic notion of a directed duty of respect.⁷ For instance, even if we grant that Michelangelo’s David has intrinsic, non-relational and non-instrumental value, it doesn’t necessarily follow that others owe the sculpture a directed, moral duty of respect. We’re then owed an account of the difference between those forms of intrinsic non-instrumental value that generate directed duties of recognition (i.e., bearers of dignity) and those that don’t (e.g., the intrinsic value of knowledge or of a sublime work of art).

Second, many philosophers worry that naturalism misses why dignity matters as distinctively as it does. Why care about a normative property that is invulnerable, immutable, and completely impervious to social recognition?⁸ The best way to capture why dignity matters socially – these philosophers argue – is to understand basic dignity as a relational property that emerges when people actually respect you.⁹

Conventionalism: Basic dignity is an extrinsic and non-relational value property that is constituted by social patterns of recognition.

The connection between dignity and recognition is constitutive: dignity is a relational and socially emergent property, one you gain when others actually recognize you. Similarly, you gain the status of police officer or university professor when others recognize you as such in the relevant way.

Yet, by making dignity parasitic on actual relations of recognition conventionalism risks losing from view the normativity of dignity, i.e., why others ought to respect your dignity. As Stephen Darwall puts the worry, the social fact that you’re respected in a certain way isn’t enough to establish the normative fact that you ought to be respected.¹⁰ After all, the social fact of slavery or patriarchy doesn’t establish that there ought to be slaves or misogynistic societies.

So much for the current state of the philosophical literature on basic dignity and recognition. I mention these familiar views not to refute them here, but to begin to articulate a relational alternative. My primary focus will be on building up and exploring the relational account – rather than on taking down the standard models. An important virtue of a relational account, I’ll argue, is that it can preserve and integrate core insights from the familiar views in a straightforward manner. As a form of naturalism, the relational account can preserve the normativity of dignity. But as a relational form of naturalism, the account can explain why failures of respect matter: dignity is not an invulnerable, immutable intrinsic property (like your height), but a developmental and dynamic property directed to recognition. Failures of recognition metaphysically involve failures to make dignity fully actual.

I’ll begin to articulate this idea by introducing an analogy to an Aristotelian metaphysics of kinds and dispositions.

To bring the metaphysics into focus, consider how you might explain the game, say, of chess to someone who has never played it. First, you’d probably focus on kinds. You’d say something like ‘here’s the king; here’s the queen; that’s the rook…’. When you do so you’re not making reference to bits of wood in this particular board. What matters is that the game consists in different kinds of pieces. But second, you also need to understand what each kind of piece does – together with the overall aim of the game. You’d say something like: “the king moves one square at a time, but in every direction…” Understanding the game requires, at least, understanding what kind of piece each instantiates and what the kind characteristically does. Call this a Kind-Dispositional model.

The Kind-Dispositional model, I think, can be developed differently for different domains. One domain could be that of physical nature. One could then develop the model as an account of causal powers and causal change.¹¹ Alternatively, the model could be developed as an account of social ontology. My suggestion is not that we analyze basic dignity in purely causal or purely social terms. Instead, the suggestion is that we develop the Kind-Dispositional model for a distinctive domain: the normative. On this model, basic dignity would be an inherently normative kind, but one that is also essentially active and dynamic, directed to full actualization via the recognition of others.

As a general matter, dispositions are inherently directed to distinctive types of manifestations. For instance, if the solubility of salt is dispositional, then salt is inherently directed to the activity of dissolution in (certain) liquids. There are two important metaphysical facts here I’ll take for granted. First, we should analyze the metaphysics of dispositions in developmental terms: while the disposition exists independently of manifestation, nevertheless the disposition is fully actual only through its complete manifestation. Second, manifestations typically require what Charles Martin has called “reciprocal disposition partners.”¹² For instance, though salt has the inherent dispositional property of solubility even in a world where liquids are absent (say, Mars), the full actualization of the property requires a reciprocal disposition partner (some liquid). Similarly, your smartphone’s screen has the disposition to fragility, a disposition that may never manifest, but that can have multiple disposition partners: a hard floor, sharp objects, heavy objects, etc. The important parallel is that the directedness of dispositions appears to be primitive, since it doesn’t seem to be possible to analyze such directedness in terms of non-directed properties.¹³

Now, I’d like to transpose these metaphysical facts from the domain of the causal to the domain of the normative. The idea is that a similar structure obtains. Like causal dispositions, dignity is directed to manifestation, exists incipiently independently of manifestation, but is fully actual only when adequate reciprocal partners are present. However, unlike causal dispositions, the directedness of dignity is an irreducibly normative affair: dignity is directed to the recognition of others. And this recognition is not merely psychological, but involves a duty, namely, the duty to respect the bearer of dignity. More precisely, then: dignity is fully actual when others act and interact with the bearer of dignity in a manner consistent with the duty of respect they owe dignity-bearer. Dignity might then be understood as an inherently normative kind, a property at once evaluative (a value) and deontic (an entitlement to respect).¹⁴

The Kind-Dispositional Model thus gives us a distinctive metaphysical framework for understanding dignity. Basic dignity is neither a purely monadic occurrent property (say, like a rock might have the molecular structure characteristic of gold) nor a purely social fact (say, like a specific piece of paper might count as a $20 bill). Instead, basic dignity is aptly understood as an inherently normative kind, whose full actualization is relational, i.e., whose full actualization requires the discharge of an interpersonal duty of respect as its reciprocal partner.

We might formulate the proposal as follows:

Relational Naturalism: Basic dignity is an inherent but deontic relational property directed to a duty of recognition – observance of which duty makes basic dignity fully actual.

For the sake of illustration suppose that your basic dignity requires manifestation through a basic entitlement to freedom of x (religion, movement, speech, political participation, etc.). The relational account would analyze such entitlements as the forms of manifestation of dignity required for its full actualization. At the same time, since dignity is an inherently relational property, its reciprocal disposition partner is the duty of respect others owe you. In this case, we’d specify the duty of respect as narrowly tailored to specific entitlements. We’d then get an account of how a failure by others to respect your entitlement to freedom of x is tantamount to a failure of respect, a failure of recognition, and thereby a failure to fully actualize your dignity in the interpersonal domain. Equivalently, for your dignity to be fully actual (at least as far as the entitlement to x is concerned) is for all other agents to act and interact with you in a manner consistent with their correlative duty to respect and uphold your entitlement to x.

With this model in view, let me now return to the argument: a relational account has the virtue of naturally integrating the core insight of each of the familiar alternatives.

An important insight of naturalist views is that dignity appears to function as an inherently normative category – not, say, as a merely social fact. By contrast, your status as a practicing lawyer is practice-dependent, because whether you count as a lawyer or a doctor depends on the specific jurisdiction in which you’re recognized as such.

As a form of naturalism, the relational model can accommodate this insight because it construes basic dignity as an inherently normative kind. Dignity is necessarily a deontic property attached to a kind (which kind? That’s the question of grounding we’re bracketing in this article). However, dignity is not an intrinsic or monadic property, but a dynamic and dispositional one, directed to full manifestation through the recognition of others. It’s a general feature of all dispositional properties (causal, social, normative) that they exist independently of manifestation. And so we can accommodate the idea that basic dignity exists and remains binding even in social contexts with pervasive failures of interpersonal or social recognition.

At the same time, a relational account can capture a key insight of conventionalist or conferral accounts, namely, that there’s a non-accidental nexus between dignity and recognition that helps us understand why dignity is vulnerable, why failures of respect matter deeply. But the relational account captures this non-accidental character distinctively. It does not say that dignity is a status or value conferred by specific, actual social practices. Instead, the non-accidental nexus to recognition is explained in terms of the essential connection between a disposition, its manifestation, and the required reciprocal disposition partner. Shifted to the normative domain, I suggested, we should think of the nexus between the dignity in one individual and the duty of respect in another as the normative analogue of disposition and reciprocal disposition partner. When specific others enact their duty of respect, they make it possible for your basic dignity to be fully actual. For instance, if your basic dignity includes a basic entitlement to freedom of x, the enactment by others of their duty to respect said entitlement is a way of fully actualizing your dignity in this interpersonal context.

Let’s take stock. My aim in this section was not to refute the standard accounts or even to show that the relational account is all-things-considered superior. Instead, I had two more modest aims. The first was conceptual: by drawing on a metaphysics of kinds and dispositions, the relational account makes explicit a distinctive metaphysical model for understanding the structure of basic dignity. The second was dialectical: an important virtue of the resulting account is that it accommodates core insights of the two standard accounts in a natural way.

II. THE SOCIAL ACTUALIZATION OF DIGNITY

Still, the account sketched so far is much too abstract and might seem vulnerable to the conventionalist objection that naturalist accounts (even relational ones) can’t explain the distinctively social nature of dignity – how respect and forms of humiliation are inherently dependent on social practices.¹⁵ To further elaborate the relational account and address this objection, this section distinguishes bipolar from social recognition and, drawing from neglected aspects of the Kantian tradition, shows why the full actualization of basic dignity requires not merely bipolar but also social forms of recognition.

To bring out this point, let’s turn to the following argument from Metaphysical Indeterminacy:

P1: Dignity and Recognition. Basic dignity requires interpersonal recognition for its full realization.

P2: Indeterminacy. However, in the state of nature – absent social kinds – such recognition is metaphysically fragile – either it doesn’t securely obtain and/or, in a range of cases, it’s indeterminate what form it should take.

Sub-Conclusion: In the moral state of nature, the very conditions of the full actualization of dignity are called for but impossible to satisfy fully.

Let me explain the argument.

P1 is the conclusion of Section I: the Kind-Dispositional framework developed for the notion of basic dignity. The model embeds dignity in a dynamic structure of relational normativity, that is, my dignity is essentially directed to your recognition in the guise of a duty of respect. My dignity and your recognition are two poles of a single developmental nexus.

P2 introduces a new form of recognition, not merely bipolar (individual-to-individual) but social recognition. Since these terms are understood variously, let me explain how I’ll use them.¹⁶ Bipolar norms link an individual to another through the correlativity of a claim-right and a duty. If Relational Naturalism is true, at least a sub-class of such norms can exist fully independently of social kinds. For instance, if your basic dignity generates a moral right not to be enslaved, such right correlates with a duty on every other person not to enslave you. But such right binds others fully even in the absence of social kinds, i.e., of social practices. By contrast, we can think of another class of bipolar norms that do depend on social practices of recognition for their full existence. For instance, even though your status as legally married comes packaged with bipolar norms (rights against and duties towards the partner), such status arguably depends for its existence on social recognition.

Note that P2, unlike familiar forms of naturalism, makes an important concession to the conventionalist: forms of social recognition are essential to basic dignity. Yet, we must proceed with care, since the relational account invites us to understand the modal claim in a distinctive way. More precisely, P2 still differs from the standard conventionalist thought in two ways. Dignity cannot be reduced to a mere social fact. And the role of recognition (even if social) is not to confer dignity in individuals. Instead, the role is to fully actualize a normative property that is independently valid but metaphysically not fully actual.

Relatedly, the point is not that basic dignity is completely indeterminate. Suppose there are two discrete societies: one permits, the other forbids slavery. The idea is not that both societies can actualize basic dignity to the same degree since dignity is metaphysically fragile. Fragility does not entail complete indeterminacy. Basic entitlements of dignity might set robust non-conventional prohibitions, say, against slavery or torture.

If metaphysical fragility is not complete indeterminateness, then how should fragility be understood? The Metaphysical Indeterminacy argument is loosely inspired by the Kantian tradition. In the Rechtslehre, Kant argues that the basic axiom of right is your original right to independence. Qua original right, the right doesn’t depend on any actions or practices, so its existence is valid a priori. At the same time, qua original right, the right is inherently relational, for it marks your status in relation to others. The right is directed to interpersonal recognition. Similarly, I’m suggesting, we should think of basic dignity as an original right, i.e., an inherently relational normative property directed to the recognition of others.

That said, (a point often neglected) Kant also argues that a priori categories of right require social kinds for their actualization. Absent social kinds, the requirements of basic dignity (or your status as independent) are metaphysically fragile in three specific ways.¹⁷ First, we need a way of specifying the requirements of dignity in a way that’s authoritative between us but that is also consistent with our equal basic dignity. For instance, if I think that basic dignity contains claims to possession of objects, then we need a way of specifying a regime of possession (or property) in a way that’s consistent with our equal dignity. Second, we need a way of modifying our entitlements to dignity in a manner consistent with such dignity, say, by introducing normative powers to promise or consent. And third, we need social ways of implementing the requirements of respect in a manner that’s consistent with the basic dignity of all involved. Together, these three forms of fragility ground the need for social kinds to actualize basic dignity.¹⁸

If talk of Aristotelian metaphysics and Kant’s Rechtslehre is beginning to sound alarm bells, you shouldn’t worry (at least not yet). For one thing, nothing in my account relies on a specific interpretation of these thinkers. For another, it requires commitment only to a typically neglected aspect of Kantian ethics: a non-individualist and more social form of freedom.¹⁹ The idea is that dignity and basic rights are directed to both interpersonal and social recognition. Their actualization requires manifestation into more concrete social kinds. Just as Kant argues that the status of independence requires introducing the social kind owner, contractor or even citizen under public law, so too, I’m arguing, basic dignity requires for its full actualization forms of social recognition that encode the requirements of dignity into concrete social kinds.

Let me illustrate with the example of citizenship. When it comes to the organization of a political community, basic dignity calls for the social kind citizen: the normative status of an individual under a given jurisdiction of law.²⁰ The social kind citizen helps to solve the problem of indeterminacy by actualizing dignity socially. The social kind citizen specifies a number of entitlements that were only incipient in basic dignity and, correlatively, specifies a number of duties of recognition-respect. By recognizing this status under law, a form of social recognition becomes available that makes it in principle possible for the basic dignity of all to be socially recognized.

As I note in subsequent sections, this possibility also introduces new possibilities of oppression, so the idea is not that the notion of citizenship is exclusively dignity-preserving. Indeed, certain aspects of it might be ideological, and a virtue of the relational account, I’ll argue, is that it can help explain both dignity-preserving and oppressive dimensions.

For now, to illustrate the structure of the relational account, consider another analogy, now to promising understood as a normative power.²¹ Though these philosophers defend the idea that the normative power of promising is valid independently of specific practices, recognition plays two distinctive roles in the full exercise of the power. First, my power to promise is directed interpersonally to your acceptance of my promise and thereby to the recognition of my act as an instance of promising. Similarly, my basic dignity is directed interpersonally to your recognition of my dignity in the guise of a duty of respect owed to me. But, second, the fact that the promising power or basic dignity are valid a priori doesn’t mean that practices have no role to play. On the contrary, in many contexts, it will be indeterminate what promising requires or what counts as promising. This doesn’t mean that promising is radically indeterminate. Instead, social practices can actualize our promising power by enacting conventions on what’s needed to make a promise (e.g., uttering certain words, tapping your head a number of times, etc.) Similarly, I’m suggesting, dignity also requires actualization through social kinds that purport to specify and implement the requirements of dignity.

With this account now in focus, we can begin to see how the relational account provides a promising and illuminating response to Killmister’s challenge: to explain why being left naked in a hospital hallway amounts to a distinct dignitarian wrong.²² On the relational account, there’s nothing intrinsically dignity-threatening about being naked. We could imagine a nudist society where being fully naked is compatible with persons acting and interacting in a manner consistent with their basic dignity. In such a society, being naked in a hospital hallway would not have the social meaning of humiliating, inferiorizing or in any other way disrespecting the individual. However, the basic bipolar norm of recognition respect is indeterminate and requires determination through social kinds. In some actual social contexts, such as that typical of 21^st century Western society, being left naked in a hallway is indeed a way of marking out the other as inferior, of humiliation, of a lack of respect. When respect is metaphysically determined through specific social kinds, being left naked acquires a different social meaning. And such social meaning is marked by the absence of social recognition. By explaining how basic dignity requires articulation into social kinds – and how the paradigmatic function of such kinds is to render metaphysically more determinate what it is to respect one another as bearers of dignity – the relational account has a promising way to address Killmister’s challenge. Yet, it can do so without collapsing into the conventionalist view that dignity is the arbitrary product of social facts about recognition.

In sum, the relational account suggests that we think of basic dignity as an inherently relational dynamic property, that is, one directed to both interpersonal and social recognition. To solve the metaphysical fragility of dignity, a priori valid dignity must nevertheless become socially actual, with social kinds enacting socially specific forms of recognizing each other’s dignity.

III. ILLUSIONS OF ENTITLEMENT

Moreover, making salient the role of social recognition in the realization of basic dignity enables the relational account to illuminate a relatively overlooked aspect of dignity: its connection to oppression and ideology. It’s not controversial to claim that certain social structures can be oppressive and dignity-hindering. A strength of naturalist accounts is that they have readily available resources to marshal such normative critique. Yet, I’ll now turn to my second main argument: a relational account can provide a distinctive, illuminating and unified account of dignity and ideology. If dignity is indeed directed to social recognition (Section II) the very same process that can actualize dignity is vulnerable to oppressive, ideological pathologies (Sections III–IV). But this mechanism possesses distinctive epistemic and practical functions that shows how the social recognition of dignity involves an inherent risk of pathological defect through the reification of dignity-hindering social kinds. The current section begins that analysis by introducing the notion of “illusions of entitlement.” The next one (Section IV) makes a connection to a Marxist analysis of ideology.

To begin to fix ideas, consider Kate Manne’s insightful analysis of the incel movement. Manne discusses the actions of Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old whose horrifically misogynistic acts led him to kill six people and injure 14 others in 2014. It’s tempting to cabin Rodger as a fringe case of mental illness – coupled with the flood of guns in America. However, Manne argues effectively that such strategy would hide from view how

incels are but a vivid symptom of a much broader and deeper cultural phenomenon. They crystallize some men’s toxic sense of entitlement to have people look up to them steadfastly, with a loving gaze, admiringly – and to target and even destroy those who fail, or refuse, to do so. And, as will emerge here eventually, these men’s sense of entitlement to such affection and admiration is a trait they often share with the far greater proportion of men who commit acts of domestic, dating, and intimate partner violence.²³

Manne makes a compelling case for identifying the incel movement’s narrative with a much “broader and deeper cultural phenomenon” of patriarchy. Her connection of this phenomenon with a “sense of entitlement” also strikes me as illuminating.

I also think we can connect Manne’s insight to the social actualization of dignity more generally – a connection Manne doesn’t explicitly make but that seems to me congenial to her account. As dignity requires crystallization into social kinds, these kinds encode specific forms of social status and accompanying entitlements. Sometimes, as we saw earlier with the case of citizenship (or, at least, some aspects of citizenship), these social crystallizations can be dignity-preserving. But sometimes, the very same mechanism can be put to work to crystallize into dignity-hindering and so oppressive social relations.

To be clear, the point is not that the specific social status (e.g., male, citizen) is identical with basic dignity. It’s not. More precisely, my claim is that the same mechanism required for the social actualization of dignity via social kinds is vulnerable to pathological forms that manifest into oppressive (basic dignity-hindering) social relations. Indeed, as I’ll explain in the next section, these pathologies can take ideological form.

Let me now try to explain how the mechanism works by coupling the relational account with Manne’s analysis of incels. The idea would be that the incel construes the social kind, male, as encoding the specific requirements of having basic dignity, but does so in a way that, in fact, self-attributes a higher social status and privileged entitlements. The constitutive connection between dignity and entitlements in the moral case gets encoded in a social kind as marking out, socially, the “superior social status” and corresponding higher entitlements built into the social kind. Of course, viewed from the perspective of basic dignity, such “superior status” and “basic entitlements to deference” are illusory. The idea that some human beings are inherently superior in moral status to others is inimical to and inconsistent with the idea that all human beings, regardless of gender, possess the same basic dignity.

My suggestion is that a key element in the pathological form of the mechanism of social recognition is that it functions by generating illusions of entitlement, false entitlements that pass off as legitimate by mirroring how more specific entitlements constitutive of other social kinds function to actualize basic dignity.

Consider this through Manne’s example. In general, I’m suggesting, many social kinds function as forms of social recognition, specifying in more determinate ways the normative status of basic dignity and its required entitlements (such as, in some cases, citizenship can do in the context of public law). However, in oppressive contexts, such as patriarchal ones, the social kind exploits the same process but in a pathological manner. The social kind male comes packaged with the illusion that instances of the kind possess a greater status and a more expansive set of entitlements than other, correlative social kinds, such as female or gender-non-conforming. To be sure, feminist philosophers have stressed how the construction of gender can be oppressive.²⁴ I’m making the additional, complementary point that part of this oppressive mechanism is connected to the social construction of dignity – but in a distorted or illusory form: the social constitution of the “superior status,” say, of the male over the female or gender-non-conforming individuals.

The same process of social recognition becomes pathological through a social form of (epistemic) self-conceit. Bearers of the kind become blinded, as it were, to the illusion precisely because having a sense that one is entitled to a form of conduct by others occludes from view the arbitrariness of one’s claims. If you think that you’re entitled to p, then that very notion of entitlement confers a certain epistemic legitimacy on the form of conduct in question. And if such entitlement is coupled to the notion of a normative status required by dignity, then we can see how the social kind can function not just to make possible novel forms of oppression (e.g., gender-based oppression), but also to contain epistemic mechanisms that help to legitimize, reify, or rationalize such oppression.

I’m not making the claim that every form of oppression can be analyzed in terms of dignity-based illusions of entitlement. Instead, I’m making the more modest but significant claim that the relational account opens up a distinctive and promising analysis of salient forms of oppression as metaphysical and epistemic distortions through social self-conceit. While standard conventionalist accounts may struggle to explain the difference between dignity preserving and dignity hindering forms of oppression (the problem of normativity), standard naturalist accounts have no such problem: social forms of oppression are inconsistent with basic dignity. My suggestion is that a relational account can preserve the normative advantage of standard naturalism but add an important dimension to the analysis, for it uncovers the unified mechanism behind many forms of oppression. Such forms of oppression are metaphysically and epistemically defective forms of social recognition, distorted through illusions of entitlement – social forms of self-conceit. My leading example here was a re-interpretation in dignitarian terms of Manne’s insightful analysis of the incel.²⁵

A second example is citizenship. On the one hand, as I pointed out earlier, some aspects of citizenship might be dignity-preserving, i.e., the social kind citizen might function as a form of social recognition of basic dignity. When it so functions, it grants on individuals a social status that specifies in a socially determinate way what it means to have basic dignity before a pervasive and coercive institution: public law. That citizenship might be a social status required by basic dignity might be gleaned by reflection on stateless individuals, who literally lack a social place to occupy legitimately. Such individuals are considered illegals and lack a rightful place to be.²⁶

On the other hand, the social kind citizen is vulnerable to pathological distortion and to illusions of entitlement. The very same process that enacts the social recognition of the status citizen is vulnerable to illusions of entitlement that legitimize, rationalize or reify forms of oppression that pass off as legitimate embodiments of dignity. The notion of citizenship can get mixed up with dignity-hindering forms of racism, ethnic purity, or even speciesm. In the face of mass migration, citizenship can be used to entrench a higher normative status “warranting” the treatment of outsiders in ways actually inimical to their basic dignity. In contexts of structural racism, citizenship can become entangled with a certain race, generating the illusion that members of a certain race enjoy greater entitlements to respect and deference, while others are confined to “second-class” citizenship. This can happen when a state ties full-citizenship exclusively to a certain race, thereby confining minorities to second-class status. And if the concept of dignity cannot be limited to the human but must be extended to the animal, then the notion of citizenship can generate the illusion that humans are entitled to “first-class” citizenship while the other animals lack any form of moral entitlements or rights.²⁷

Let me sum up and clarify the argument. In Section I, I suggested that basic dignity is inherently directed to interpersonal (or bipolar) recognition. In Section II, I developed the Kind-Dispositional model to explain why the full actualization of dignity also requires a process of social recognition via social kinds. Social recognition establishes concrete social status and corresponding entitlements that are designed to actualize basic dignity. My suggestion in this section is that the same process that is required to make basic dignity socially real is also vulnerable to pathological distortion via illusions of entitlement. And as we’re about to see, such illusions of entitlements play distinctively ideological functions.

IV. DIGNITY AND IDEOLOGY

I now elaborate the notion of “illusions of entitlement” by bringing the relational analysis into contact with a Marxist notion of ideology. I argue that a relational analysis offers a nuanced account of the connection between basic dignity and ideology: while dignity is not inherently ideological (contra skeptics), the social mechanism required for the actualization of dignity remains vulnerable to distortion and illusions of entitlement. I argue that the relational account of the metaphysical role of social recognition not only illuminates the pathological forms of social recognition (as social self-conceit) but also clarifies the nexus to ideology. This connection between dignity and ideology via illusions of entitlement provides a conceptual framework for understanding how individuals fall into social patterns of oppression sometimes even without realizing – illusions of entitlement create epistemic blinders fed by non-cognitive interests. For reasons of space, I’ll limit my discussion to the conceptual framework, leaving for another occasion the connection to more substantive and empirical exploration.

Let’s start by introducing a working notion of ideology. I’ll take for granted Tommie Shelby’s excellent analysis in order to examine more carefully the connection between dignity and ideology – a connection often neglected in the philosophical literature on dignity.²⁸

Although Marxism is now often regarded as obsolete, Shelby argues powerfully that ideology-based criticism is indispensable for understanding and resisting forms of oppression.²⁹ Shelby begins by clarifying that the sense of “ideology” he means to isolate is not the non-evaluative sense referring to a set of beliefs, say, about social and political organization (e.g., the contrast between liberalism and conservatism). Instead, by “ideology” he means an evaluative notion that always suggests a form of criticism.³⁰ In particular, Shelby suggests that ideologies are best understood as sets of beliefs possessing distinctive epistemic, functional, and genetic dimensions.³¹

Epistemically, ideologies function by perpetrating what Shelby calls “ideological illusions,” distorted, biased, or misleading representations of reality.³² Shelby cautiously accepts the notion that ideologies involve false consciousness. But Shelby understands by this the idea that some individuals accept a system of belief not in virtue of its independent epistemic warrant, but rather because doing so serves some non-cognitive interest.³³ An important virtue of this analysis of ideology is that it helps us understand why people often stubbornly resist giving up ideology: if the ideology provides a prima facie warrant and it serves some further non-cognitive interest, then, this creates resistance to epistemic challenge.

But ideologies are not merely epistemic vehicles for the formation of beliefs; they also play a distinctive social function: they establish and stabilize relations of oppression, Shelby suggests, precisely in virtue of cognitive defects.

To justify the brutality of slave conditions and the systematic coercive exploitation of human labor, slaves were viewed as less than fully autonomous agents … This, in a now familiar rationalization, allowed the slave-holding classes to maintain that Africans and their descendants did not deserve to be accorded the same respect and rights due (some) ‘white’ human beings and, therefore, that plantation slavery did not run afoul of liberal principles of equality and autonomy.³⁴

Antiblack racial ideology clearly manifested cognitive defects, for the representation of blacks as less than fully autonomous agents lacks robust epistemic warrant. At the same time, this illusion buttressed the social function of establishing and stabilizing a social form of oppression. This social function is sometimes enacted through legitimation: the ideology helps legitimize and render invisible the oppression, say, of blacks by the white slave-holding classes. But Shelby suggests that ideologies can also reify, creating the illusion that what is a contingent historical and social construct is a “natural” and thus unavoidable, unalterable normative order.³⁵ The key point is that “through their illusions they [ideologies] lead people to fail to recognize or properly appreciate the fact that they are implicated in social relations of oppression.”³⁶

Finally, ideology has a key genetic dimension: the specific, class-based socioeconomic causes that lead to false consciousness.³⁷ For instance, a Marxist would offer a class-based analysis of the material conditions that gave rise to anti-black ideology as those characteristic of American slavery or, later, of Jim Crow social stratification.

In sum, an ideology is a social consciousness (or network of beliefs) that (i) is distorted by epistemic illusions; that (ii) functions to establish or reinforce social relations of oppression via such illusions; and that (iii) has a characteristic etiology, e.g., class-structured false consciousness.

Taking for granted this analysis of ideology, we are now in a better position to investigate: what’s the connection between dignity and ideology?

Familiar philosophical accounts of dignity do not typically address the question of ideology. But if they did, they’d probably say that dignity is an inherently positive moral idea and so, necessarily, not ideological. At the opposite extreme, less sanguine thinkers may say that, necessarily, dignity is ideological. For instance, the work of historian Samuel Moyn has done much to illuminate the ideological character of dignity in Shelby’s reification sense: what philosophers often take to be a “natural” and unavoidable moral idea is, in fact, a contingent and very recent historical artifact – for example, one emerging out of the Irish constitution of 1937.³⁸

An attractive feature of the relational analysis, I now argue, is that it offers a more nuanced account of the connection between dignity and ideology. Unlike more skeptical accounts, the relational analysis denies that dignity is necessarily ideological. Yet, understanding the essential connection between dignity and social recognition lets us see how dignity is vulnerable to ideological distortion, in our terms, through illusions of entitlement. Let me now elaborate.

Some skeptics argue that the very notion of dignity is ideological, illusory. Michael Rosen has highlighted this wonderful quote from Nietzsche:

Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labour, are the needy product of slavedom hiding itself from itself. Woeful time, in which the slave requires such conception, in which he is incited to think about and beyond himself!³⁹

Nietzsche’s point is that the very notion of the dignity of man is an illusory phantom, a sentimental illusion designed to conceal the fact that domination by the strong and slavery of the weak is the brutal but beautiful essence of the human.

One need not endorse Nietzsche’s brutal will-to-power to treat dignity as inherently ideological. Michael Rosen has made a powerful case against dignity without relying on Nietzschean ethics. First, Rosen argues that dignity is humbug: it’s an empty idea where we expect to find a solid foundation for morality.⁴⁰ Second, Rosen argues that if dignity is a matter of rank or social status, then one would be committed to a conventionalist account, for such normative status depends on agreed social conventions. However, if dignity is nothing more than a “conventional status,” then “what significance can it still have to attribute to all human beings, just in virtue of being human, a status that was originally reserved only for a privileged portion of them?”⁴¹ And, third, if we avoid the problems of conventionalism by turning to naturalism, we seem committed to thinking of dignity as an “inner transcendental kernel of value.”⁴² The trouble, argues Rosen, is that there is no such value. And if there were, it would be an idea that fails to guide conduct and that, as a result, can be used to support attacks on equality.⁴³

Putting these considerations together, let’s ask: what exactly does a relational account add to our understanding of the nexus between dignity and ideology? My argument is that a relational account can meet in a distinctive way each of Rosen’s challenges while illuminating why ideology is an inherent risk involved in the social recognition of dignity.

Rosen’s first point is that dignity is humbug because empty. Dignity is empty because it fails to determine a specific course of action for every possible scenario. Here’s Rosen:

We shall look in vain in Kant for an objective algorithm for moral decision-taking.⁴⁴

I agree with Rosen that we won’t find in a Kantian, dignity-based account an algorithm for moral decision-taking, with basic premises involving dignity-concepts and derivative conclusions containing determinate outcomes for every possible scenario.

But that’s a failure only if one assumes that that is the only or main role dignity should play.⁴⁵ By contrast to both Rosen and standard naturalist accounts, I’ve suggested a different (Kant-inspired) and more social picture of moral deliberation. First, dignity is not entirely indeterminate. Used as a premise, we can reason, say, to prohibitions of slavery or of odious racism. But second, and more interestingly, a relational account can recognize some insight in Rosen’s point. Because dignity is metaphysically fragile and requires development through social kinds (a point absent from standard naturalism), it is true that the very abstract notion of basic dignity cannot determine a specific course of action for every possible scenario. After all, that was the very point made above in the argument from metaphysical indeterminacy. An advantage of the relational model, then, is that it lets us see why indeterminacy is indeed a feature of basic dignity, but not a problematic one.

It bears stressing that, on this way of reading the Kantian tradition, the same is true of other basic moral ideas, such as the power to promise. With Shiffrin, we might hold that the power to promise is a basic aspect of our moral agency, one realized interpersonally by varying our entitlements and duties. But the pre-conventional status of the power of promise doesn’t mean that promising works through an “objective algorithm for moral decision-making.” Many aspects of promising may turn out to vary conventionally – when the promise is complete, what counts as promising, even what counts as a reasonable exemption.

In short, Rosen’s first objection can seem powerful for standard naturalist accounts, but is bypassed by a relational variant. A relational account lets us see that Rosen’s objection rests on a false dilemma: either the abstract concept of basic dignity settles all practical questions for every scenario, or, if it fails to do so, it’s an empty and useless idea. By contrast, the relational account offers an alternative account of moral deliberation (a specificatory one rather than an algorithmic one)⁴⁶ supported by a robust metaphysics. Though dignity is not completely indeterminate, it is metaphysically fragile. Many specific requirements of dignity will require articulation through social kinds (e.g., your status as a citizen).

Rosen’s second objection targets conventionalist accounts – specifically Waldron’s view of dignity as a socially constituted rank – and develops the problem of normativity. Since in this article I’m not making a comparative argument for the superiority of the relational over familiar conventionalist accounts, I won’t have anything to say about how powerful this objection is against such accounts. But I will say that even if the problem of normativity is a challenge for conventionalist accounts, it is not one for the relational account, since this account, as we’ve seen, treats basic dignity as an inherently normative property. There is no attempt here to derive normative facts from non-normative, social facts.

Rosen’s third objection is that if dignity is an “inner transcendental kernel of value,” dignity doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion.

Once again, the objection might be a challenge for standard naturalist accounts,⁴⁷ but even if it is, such objection bypasses a relational account. Basic dignity is itself a relational, dynamic property, a kind that is inherently directed to two forms of recognition: interpersonal and social recognition. And since it’s inherently directed to a duty of recognition, dignity is not an inner transcendental kernel of value.

At least part of Rosen’s worry is that it makes it mysterious why we’d care about violations of dignity: if dignity is invulnerable and impervious to change, such violations should make no difference. By contrast, the relational account suggests that dignity is an inherently relational and dynamic property, directed to full actualization through recognition. Failures of recognition (interpersonal or social) hinder the full actualization of dignity. Thus, we get a natural explanation of why we’d care about violations of dignity, since such violations hinder the realization of dignity.

While the relational account offers, in this way, distinctive resources for pushing back on global skepticism about dignity, it also gives us resources for a more nuanced account of the potentially ideological dimensions of dignity.

While dignity is indeed non-ideological in its primary and paradigmatic form, its relational and social nature means that it harbors an inherent risk of becoming ideological. In particular, I’ve suggested, the mechanism of socially actualizing dignity harbors a danger of generating illusions of entitlements – a phenomenon we may now link to ideological distortion. Individuals use (perhaps through false consciousness) the conceptual machinery of dignity and rights to establish illusory forms of status and entitlement – the dignity of the male, the white race, the wealthy.

The relational account can thus integrate the fourth point made by Rosen, namely, that the concept of dignity can be used to justify actions or policies that are inimical to equality. When basic dignity is encoded in social kinds that are basic-dignity hindering, such oppressive social kinds may indeed be inimical to equality (at least understood as equal basic dignity). What’s more, such social kinds will be constituted by illusions of entitlement and thereby perform the ideological functions so clearly identified by Shelby. They’ll play the epistemic function of seeking to offer warrant for beliefs that have become shielded from reasonable epistemic challenge – because the alleged epistemic warrant is in fact supported by the preservation of non-cognitive interests. They’ll play the social function of stabilizing and legitimizing (or reifying) forms of oppression by passing off the kind as a legitimate normative status encoded by legitimate entitlements. And they’ll have the genetic dimension of stemming from social forms of power that, again, pass off as legitimate but in fact are basic-dignity hindering.

Once again, turn to the example of citizenship. A relational account can help illuminate how dimensions of citizenship can be dignity-preserving: the social status of citizen can function as a social actualization of our basic dignity as a status under public law. At the same time, the introduction of the social kind citizen opens up novel forms of dignity-hindering oppression through illusions of entitlement. The illusion, say, that my citizenship confers on me fundamental moral entitlements lacked by non-citizens. The illusion that my privileged race is entitled to superior privileges and status because my race is tied up with citizenship. Or, if the correct moral extension of dignity is to non-human animals, citizenship can generate the illusion that humans have greater moral entitlements than other species of animals. In a word, the social kind of citizenship becomes a double-edged sword: a necessary step in the social actualization of dignity, but also one that opens up new possibilities of oppression by generating illusions of entitlement.

My argument in this section has been that a relational account offers a nuanced explanation of the nexus between dignity and ideology. The account can mount a powerful and distinctive defense against some of the standard forms of the charge that dignity is inherently ideological. At the same time, the account doesn’t entirely dismiss ideology. Instead, it accepts the worry that dignity can indeed function ideologically. But the explanation is distinctive. Basic dignity cannot be ideological. Yet, since basic dignity is directed to two forms of recognition (interpersonal and social), the gradual social actualization of dignity is liable to generate illusions of entitlement. And such illusions do bear the hallmarks of ideology, since they display the epistemic, functional, and genetic dimensions of ideology clearly explained by Shelby.

What the relational account lets us see, then, is that acknowledging the vulnerability of dignity to ideological distortion doesn’t entail that dignity is an essentially useless or illusory concept. Instead, moral reality is more complex. And a virtue of the relational account, I’ve argued, is that it captures such complexity in a unified way.

V. CONCLUSION

What’s the connection between dignity and recognition? Philosophical accounts typically offer two types of answers: for the naturalist, recognition is merely contingent for the existence of basic dignity; for the conventionalist, social recognition constitutes dignity as a social status. The relational analysis offers a distinctive alternative. Exploiting an analogy to a metaphysics of kinds and dispositions, we may understand dignity as a normative property that is both inherent and relational. It’s inherent in the sense that it’s attached to a pre-conventional kind, but it’s relational because it’s necessarily directed to interpersonal recognition by others.

I did not attempt here to refute the standard accounts or to provide a complete vindication of the relational analysis. Instead, I’ve highlighted two advantages of the relational account: it offers a robust alternative to standard accounts (while integrating some of their key insights) and it offers a nuanced account of the connection between dignity and ideology. Basic dignity is not an empty, useless or inherently ideological idea. Still, the necessary process for its social actualization does open up novel possibilities of oppression, some of which may be understood as functioning precisely through illusions of entitlement.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I incurred many debts in writing this article. I’m grateful to audiences at the APA Pacific (and in particular to my commentators, Ravi Thakral and Natassia Zander) and at the workshop “Human Dignity: Theory and Practice” (McGill and Concordia), whose participants Tom Christiano, Steve Darwall, Nandi Theunissen, Jordan Walters, and Daniel Weinstock gave me wonderful, constructive feedback. Finally, I’m especially grateful to Pablo Gilabert, Suzy Killmister, Matt Perry, and two anonymous referees for detailed comments on this article – and to Bob Goodin for his editorial insight.

COMPETING INTERESTS

The author declares that he has no competing interests.