Dignity, degradation and freedom
cn: cannibalism mention, sex work, selling one’s organs
In this podcast, Julia Galef talks to political philosopher Michael Sandel about human dignity. Sandel argues that some personal choices are not morally permissible, even if they don’t seriously negatively affect others, because they violate human dignity. Let’s say that a person allows herself to be cannibalized, or agrees to get an ad for a casino tattooed on his forehead — even if these people freely agree to these things (Sandel argues), they are still immoral.
I found this conversation frustrating because (I felt) Sandel never defined what ‘human dignity’ even is. This got me thinking about how I would define ‘dignity’ and ‘degradation’. The ideal definition would both respect the fact that people want wildly different things, but also do justice to the widespread intuition that actions can be wrong even if all parties involved appear to ‘freely’ agree.
I suggest the following definition:
An act violates human dignity, and is degrading, when the person doing or undergoing the act would not have chosen to do it if they were truly free and acting with true authenticity.
What do I mean by ‘truly free’ and ‘acting with true authenticity’? I suggest that if an action is truly free and authentic, it (i) arises from internal motivation rather than external, and (ii) the person doing the action is motivated by the promise of pleasure and reward, rather than the fear of pain and punishment if they don’t do the act. If someone is in a neutral, basically-ok state, and chooses to do something because it feels good and right to do so, that is free and authentic; if on the other hand they choose to do the action just because failure to do the action will result in pain (either external punishment or internal emotional turmoil), that seems to me more coerced or unfree.
According to this definition, no act is inherently degrading or undignified — or inherently dignified. It depends on the attitude of the person doing the action. I’ll illustrate this with some case studies, then add some more general thoughts. Generally, when thinking about the question of ‘how degrading is an act for most people?’, I find it useful to ask ‘how many people would be likely to take this action in a post-scarcity utopia, where everyone’s basic needs were met?’
Case studies
Selling organs
Some people argue that selling one’s organs should be legal; others find this idea extremely sinister. My opinion: many in our world probably would be willing to sell their organs if it were legal, because lots of people in our world are very poor and need the money. Probably, not that many people would spontaneously want to sell their organs in a post-scarcity utopia. I therefore think that if selling organs were legal, it would be degrading for the majority of people who did it.
Still, even in the post-scarcity utopia, some people would probably have a selling-their-organs kink, and for them (by my definition), it wouldn’t be degrading to sell their organs at all. Or, some people might willingly donate their organs to save others, just as people do now. This is (correctly) seen as not degrading at all.
Consensual cannibalism
Being eaten would be degrading for many people, but some people really want to be killed and eaten (consider yourself content-warned). I don’t think it’s degrading for someone to be killed and eaten, if that’s what they really want.
Forehead tattoos of ads
If you’re the sort of person who would find it quirky, funny, or ironic to have an advert tattooed on your forehead — or if you sincerely love the brand you’re advertizing and want to promote them — then it’s not degrading to have an advert tattooed on your forehead. If you hate it and feel deeply embarrassed about it, but it was your only way to make money in a pinch, then it is degrading.
Sex work
Some people think ‘sex work is (just) work’, a job like any other. Other people think it’s a degrading, abusive manifestation of patriarchal evil. I think that for some people sex work is degrading, for others it’s not. If you’re coerced into sex work, either by physical violence or economic forces, then it’s degrading, and something we should definitely worry about! But lots of people genuinely enjoy sex work, and choose to do it even when they’re financially well-off and could do other things. For these people, sex work isn’t degrading at all.
Bullshit jobs
David Graeber argues that a large proportion of jobs are ‘bullshit jobs’ — that is, jobs that, according to those who do them ‘[are] utterly meaningless, contribute[] nothing to the world…should not really exist’. If people think that their job is bullshit, they may well find it degrading.
Miscellaneous
According to my theory, lots of things are low-key degrading. There are lots of things we do that are not a big deal, but that make us die inside just a tiny bit; they make us feel ‘dirty’, inauthentic, not our best self. I think many people hate bureaucracy and ‘admin’ for this reason: these things are imposed by external authorities (the state, workplaces, etc), often frustratingly slow or poorly designed, and not intrinsically rewarding.
Implications
Economic coercion
Most of these examples involve economic coercion — many actions can be degrading if a person chooses to do them only because they need the money. This wasn’t deliberate, but it’s not exactly an accident either, because poverty is one of the greatest coercive forces in our world.
With regard to organ-selling, sex work, and exploitatively low-paid jobs, I’ve heard arguments like:
‘If two people freely and willingly make a trade, it must have benefited them both. Even if a person only [sold their organs/sold sex/took a job] out of economic necessity, it doesn’t help to take that option away from them. Therefore, we should make these things legal, and there’s nothing immoral about these trades.’
I find these arguments quite convincing, and I tentatively agree that it might be better to legalize many ways of making money that are currently illegal. But I also want to say, ‘yes! But that doesn’t make this whole situation ok!’ These arguments seem to ‘flatten’ the concepts of choice and freedom in a way that doesn’t track reality. If I ‘choose’ to take a good job that feels interesting to me, this feels metaphysically different from a poor person taking a terrible job because if they don’t, they can’t pay their rent or feed their family. This is true even if we do want to give the poor person that choice, all else equal.
Doing something degrading isn’t immoral
In situations where a person chooses to do something degrading, we shouldn’t blame them, or think of them as morally at fault at all, because (by my definition) if it was freely chosen, it’s not degrading, and if it’s degrading, it was coerced. It’s not fair to blame people for things they were forced to do.
Degradation inheres neither in an act nor a person, but in the interaction between a specific person and a specific act. This is a fancy way of saying that an act that’s degrading for one person, will be totally fine for another.
Relatedly, I think when people have a strong intuition that ‘X is degrading’, this is a way of saying that it would be really degrading for them personally. I think this is true for many feminists who are strongly anti-sex work, for example — they can’t imagine ever possibly enjoying it, so they assume that the only possible reason for someone to do it is coercion.
Even if we are aware that degradation is subjective, we might still be concerned about degrading-to-us activities becoming widespread. Feminists who oppose sex work might worry that if sex work becomes legalized and normalized, they themselves will be under more pressure to do it. (For example, when on unemployment benefits, they may be pressured into working as an escort).This is a reasonable worry, because our culture is generally not great at accommodating minority boundaries and preferences; for example, most people feel neutral-to-positive about background music in cafes and social ambiguity, so those things are the norm, even though a minority of people find them extremely bothersome.
Our perceptions of dignity and degradation are plastic, just like our preferences
There might be some things that we initially find degrading, but later do not find degrading, perhaps because we’ve found meaning or purpose in them. For example, perhaps a person initially finds a certain household chore degrading, but once she reframes it as a way to make her living space more pleasant and help her housemates, it stops being degrading.