Human dignity and incarceration
What’s the difference between torture and thirty years behind bars?
The vagueness of the term “human dignity” is matched only by its importance. It serves, in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and many national constitutions, as the source or justification of individual rights. Dignity, at its core, relates to the notion that humans are incredibly special creatures, such that they must be treated with a certain (high) amount of respect and concern. From carbon, dust, etc. emerge these conscious, wondrous beings. Jeremy Waldron, political philosopher at NYU Law, has argued that dignity entails granting each person a very high social status or standing, along the lines of that accorded to European nobility in earlier centuries.
The content and details of this respect and concern will depend upon how a community fills in the details of the concept of dignity. That is, what the community believes it owes its members will depend upon why they believe people are special and worthy. So, in a liberal society, we think that one especially value-laden facet of people is their autonomy, their ability to make moral choices, their ability to make life-plans and carry them out, etc. To respect someone’s dignity, then, means enabling their autonomy or possibly not infringing it to some unspecified degree.
For dignity to gain analytical traction it has to mean something more than autonomy-and I think that is the case. Many people think, for instance, that one should not be able to freely choose slavery, since slavery compromises one’s dignity. In that case, free choice (autonomy) is at odds with dignity. There is also a famous French and European case where a judge ruled that dwarf tossing (exactly what it sounds like) was illegal because it infringed upon the dignity of the dwarf, even though the dwarf consented to (and was paid for) the experience. The slavery example is better.
Often, dignity is associated with a notion of inviolability, meaning that a person’s dignity can never, under any circumstances, be infringed upon. Or, more moderately, that egregious forms of indignity can never be justified. The argument against torture or cruel and unusual punishment largely depends upon this view. So, the argument goes, regardless of the rationale for torture-say, as criminal punishment for the most heinous crime or as an inducement to receive the most pressing intelligence-it would be wrong to torture; it would infringe upon one’s untouchable dignity.
My question relates to incarceration. Say someone was sentenced to twenty or thirty years in prison. Such a sentence, in some special circumstances, is justifiable. But this sentence, I believe, would violate the prisoner’s dignity, just as it would were he sentenced to 1000 lashes, regardless of how decent the prison conditions. For, if dignity protects what is special about somebody-and autonomy is one crucial facet of this, which entails the right to form and carry out a life plan-then confining someone to one, relatively nasty building for thirty years infringes their autonomy and dignity clearly. Their ability to make and carry out a life plan is more or less destroyed. And yet I still believe in certain circumstances, it’s justifiable to do so.
Let’s assume that I’m right so far–that torture and long-term incarceration both infringe upon dignity. This leaves us with a few options.
First is to argue that since long-term incarceration is justifiable, even though it infringes upon dignity (because there are very good reasons for it, which I won’t discuss here), then torture must be justifiable when there are very good reasons. And thus dignity is not inviolable. It can be infringed when there are very good reasons.
A second option is to distinguish between the types of indignity that occur between torture and incarceration, such that one may be inviolable and the other violable. The former is less about its affect on autonomy, broadly conceived, than about a short-term experience of subjugation and extreme pain. Torture’s harm can be cashed out in autonomy-speak, but I don’t think that fully captures the picture.
A third, maybe most fruitful option is to examine the differing reasons for infringing dignity in the different cases. That someone made a choice to commit a crime is relevant, to what degree and in what manner, I’m not sure. But this, importantly, would still lead to the conclusion that dignity is violable in some cases.
A fourth option is to argue that long-term incarceration is never justifiable, though this doesn’t seem very promising.
I hope to talk more about this in future posts.
-Jake
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- Genius and self-respect
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One Response to “Human dignity and incarceration”
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This isn’t a very bright post. Unless I’m misunderstanding, you take a component of personhood, then argue because imprisonment infringes on this it somehow equivalent to torture:
“So, in a liberal society, we think that one especially value-laden facet of people is their autonomy, their ability to make moral choices, their ability to make life-plans and carry them out, etc.”
I mean, obviously anyone who opposes torture and supports incarceration (so almost anyone who opposes torture) is going to argue that the concept of human dignity is much richer than mere autonomy. Like surely if my life plan was to travel faster than the speed of light, and I couldn’t do that, we wouldn’t say that my dignity had been infringed upon, even though by the above you would say that it has been.
Dignity I think has to do more with personhood, with will. When someone is tortured they fundamentally lose their personhood. They don’t describe themselves as the same person, they aren’t able to make decisions, they aren’t even really able to distinguish between fact and lie. There’s a part of a person which is destroyed by torture, a part that isn’t necessarily destroyed by imprisonment.
Two things should be noted. 1) It is very common for the criminal justice system to destroy dignity in this way, just as it is very common for the criminal justice system to torture. There’s no difference really between long term imprisonment in a supermax jail, and Padilla. 2) You can have this kind of destruction of will and personhood in areas where autonomy isn’t importantly infringed upon such as spousal abuse.
Basically I think that rather than declaring dignity to be vague, and then picking an interpretation that suits you, you might want to do a little more work on the subject.
g.