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HUMAN DIGNITY. Three weeks ago, President Bush pointed out that Article III of the Geneva Conventions prohibits "outrages against human dignity", a term that he found too imprecise to guide detainee policy. As Rodger Payne notes, the Bush administration has felt free to use the term "human dignity" in other contexts without feeling a need for clarification. In the National Security Strategy of the United States, Section IIA:
The United States must defend liberty and justice because these principles are right and true for all people everywhere. These nonnegotiable demands of human dignity are protected most securely in democracies. The United States Government will work to advance human dignity in word and deed, speaking out for freedom and against violations of human rights and allocating appropriate resources to advance these ideals.President Bush also made use of the term "human dignity" in his UN speech of September 21, 2004, suggesting that a belief in human dignity led to a concern for the problems of poverty, AIDS, human trafficking, and human cloning. In short, the president has found it useful in the past to take advantage of the vagueness surrounding the concept "human dignity". There's nothing particularly surprising about this, because human dignity is an intentionally vague term that ought to defy clarification. The phrase is useful because of its rhetorical force, not because of its specificity. The president finds it useful because it appeals beyond a liberal Western perspective, and the framers of the Geneva Conventions found it useful for the same reason. Because human dignity can mean so many things, it is appealing to multiple audiences. There's nothing wrong with this; indeed, it helps set the rhetorical foundation necessary for cooperative action among peoples and states who disagree about fundamental principles. As Scott Lemieux and others have noted, efforts to clarify the meaning of phrases like "human dignity" and "cruel and unusual" have the effect of underming the value that abstractness lends. Asking "What does that mean -- 'outrages upon human dignity'" robs the term of its force and renders it rhetorically useless.
--Robert Farley
