Nicholas Buccola

“We Are Human, Too”: On James Baldwin’s Politics of Dignity

The concept of human dignity has been the subject of a scholarly renaissance of late (Rosen 2012; Waldron 2012; McCrudden 2013; Kateb 2014). In this article I attempt to contribute to this ongoing conversation about the meaning of dignity by exploring James Baldwin’s reflections on the idea during his 1965 debate withWilliam F. Buckley Jr. at the Cambridge Union.What does it mean to treat another human being in a way that recognizes her as a bearer of equal moral worth? This question was at the forefront of Baldwin’s mind when he spoke at Cambridge. Inwhat follows, I contend thatmuch ofwhatwe can learn from the debate about Baldwin’s understanding of dignity comes in the form of his articulation of a “negative morality” (Allen 2001). In other words, his understanding of dignity emerges not so much in the form of a positive construction of the idea, but rather by drawing our attention to the ways in which human dignity is undermined by America’s “racial nightmare.” Baldwin’s “negative morality” of dignity consists of three major components: the catalog of disaster committed by agents of injustice every day, the destruction of the moral lives of the agents of injustice, and the dehumanizing politics of liberal concern.

“The Essential Dignity of Man as Man”: Frederick Douglass on Human Dignity

The idea of dignity figures prominently in Frederick Douglass’s philosophy of rights, duties, and virtues. In this essay, I argue that Douglass’s understanding of dignity is best understood as a capacities-based account; he contends that the special moral worth of human beings is rooted in their distinctive capacities to reason, to understand morality, to choose how they will act, and to think of themselves as subjects that exist through time. Douglass relied on this account to argue that human beings have certain rights that ought to be protected, that they have certain duties to others, and that they can demonstrate their dignity by using their capacities in virtuous ways. Douglass’s philosophy of dignity lends support to J. David Greenstone’s suggestion that Douglass is best understood as a reform liberal; he was focused on the cultivation of essential human capacities and the duty to secure the conditions necessary for others to cultivate those capacities.