A Reaction Paper on: Human Uniqueness and Human Dignity: Persons in Nature and the Nature of Persons

Immanuel Kant identifies dignity with humanity and respect for persons, where recognition thereof is a foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.

Dignity manifests in ourselves on various levels, from the basic where it is inalienable and common, then to the developmental level where dignity can be achieved or lost, recognized or withheld. Dignity therefore is identity.

This identity is the uniqueness that differentiates humans to non-humans. In this respect, mixing our biological finitude with cultural refinements, we radically differ from animals. Animals do not form cultures. Animals inherit some skills by copying the behavior of others, but genetics remains the dominant mode of intergenerational information transfer.

Humans can participate intensively in the knowledge and skills that each other has acquired. This collaborative learning is what has produced human cultures. Human dignity includes the capacity for growing into and assimilating a cumulative transmissible culture.

It could be said that one person’s dignity is distinctively a Filipino, be that he is raised in the Philippines, not only is he raised in that landscape but into that culture. To differentiate, animals, failing such cultural heritages, fails in such possibilities of dignity.

HUMAN DIGNITY AND ANIMAL INTEGRITY.

Distinguishing humans from animals however must not result in a separatist approach where we begin to devalue animal life. One ought to respect life, be it human or animal.

But certainly, human life carries a dignity that merits an especially high level of respect. By being discriminating about our uniqueness as humans, we are obliged to the idea of human dignity.

We would never attribute dignity to rocks, or plants, or animals no matter how majestic or sublime they are. True, we do not learn what it means to be human by studying apes, but if we can gain some account of the thresholds we have crossed, the more we might understand human uniqueness and of our resulting dignity.

Terrence W. Deacon said that “hundreds of millions of years of evolution have produced hundreds of thousands of species with brains, and tens of thousands with complex behavioral, perceptual, and learning abilities. Only one of these has ever wondered about its place in the world because only one evolved the ability to do so.” To put it simply, human in unique in such away that it has dignity, and identity.

Such uniqueness is manifested in our Ideational, Idiographic, Existential, and Ethical concepts, as follows:

IDEATIONAL UNIQUENESS

Putting it simply, all human dignity consists in thoughts.

Pascal’s insights as human being the rational animals points to our ideational uniqueness. Human are remarkable among all other species in their capacities to process thoughts, ideas, symbolic abstractions figured into interpretive gestalts with which the world is understood and life is oriented.

This can be gleaned upon the studies of nature of language and in neuroscience. Stephen R. Anderson underscores that human language is different in fundamental ways from the communication system of other animals. Using our native language, we can produce and understand sentences we have never encountered before.

Ian Tattersall and Richard Potts both concludes that our ideational uniqueness involves complex use of symbols, as we have cognitive powers and much of our behavior is conditioned by abstract and symbolic concerns.

IDIOGRAPHIC UNIQUENESS

Jose Ortega y Gasset pointed out that “Man in a word has no nature, what he has is history.” Which means that what nature is to things, history is to man. More carefully put, humans have the remarkable capacity to experience and to individuate their narrative careers.

The human mind creates for itself a unique person, a human being placed in a community of other humans, with its own embodies self-consciousness in the midst of others equally idiographic.

Humans are reared over decades in families, from which they acquire their identities, characters, habits, neighborhoods, network of support, commitment, and worldviews.

This means that a person can follow a biography, cradle to grave, as no animal can.

EXISTENTIAL UNIQUENESS.

Only humans have their personal identities, as in the word denoting to himself, “I”.

With humans, we need the term “spirit” to get past the consciousness that is present in animals and capture this self-reflective inwardness. Animals do not feel ashamed or proud and certainly no angst, etc. which human experiences in a daily basis.

The principal focus of many discussions of human dignity is autonomy. A violation of such autonomy shuts down this distinctively human openness for particular life-imagination, construction, and responsibility.

ETHICAL UNIQUENESS

Humans are unique in ethical concepts, and there is nowhere in animal behavior the capacity to be reflectively ethical. To be ethical is to reflect on considered principles of right or wrong and to act accordingly.