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Stu Woolman 195
moral philosophy, and has been employed again and again by
Constitutional Courts in Germany, in Canada and in South Africa from
the very inception of their respective constitutional projects, that
constant return does not turn the right to dignity into a right that
means anything and everything, and therefore nothing. As we shall
see, the right to dignity, like The Second Coming, speaks powerfully
to the violence and the anarchy of the 20th and 21st Centuries. More
importantly, however, dignity, as a rule-generating right (and value)
in South African constitutional law, moves in an ever widening gyre
that speaks not just to our past but to our future, and denotes an ever
widening gyre of constitutional obligations to our fellow citizens.
2 History
South Africa boasts one of the world’s most developed bodies of
dignity jurisprudence. Only the Federal Constitutional Court’s gloss on
the meaning of dignity in Germany’s Basic Law can match the richness
of our Constitutional Court’s account.
As the epigram from Justice Ackermann suggests, the richness of
this jurisprudence flows, in part, from South African history. The
Truth and Reconciliation Commission (‘TRC’), for example,
recognised that dignity has its roots in the simple idea that justice
consists of the refusal to turn away from suffering. The TRC’s
unflinching commitment to the provisional provision of a historical
record of such suffering under apartheid was the first step in our
moral re-awakening. However, dignity traces an arc that extends
beyond the narrow duty to refuse to turn away from suffering to a
broader duty to recognise our fellow citizens as agents capable of
governing themselves. The granting of a truly universal franchise, and
its exercise in the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994 (and in every
other subsequent election), constitutes formal recognition of the
capacity of each person to legislate for him or her self. The history of
dignity in South Africa does not end there. The formal recognition of
our compatriots as autonomous moral agents underwrites an even
wider obligation to convert their innate talents into capabilities that
will, in turn, enable them to realise their preferred way of being in
the world. When refracted through the prism of dignity, the Final
Constitution extends our obligations, beyond the franchise and those
civil liberties that permit us to legislate for ourselves, to socioeconomic
rights that guarantee the material transformation of the
lives of each and every South African. 2 This brief history of our new-
2 See S Liebenberg ‘The value of human dignity in interpreting socio-economic
rights’ (2005) 21 South African Journal on Human Rights 1. See S Woolman
‘Dignity’ in S Woolman et al (eds) Constitutional Law of South Africa (2nd
Edition, OS, 2006) Chapter 36, available at www.westlaw.com.