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218 Chapter 13
For someone, like myself, who agrees with Prof Allen Wood 2 that
in our age too many ‘choose ... to apologise for the rationally
indefensible’ and others ‘are caught up in the fashionable mood of
irony, absurdity, and self-destruction’ because ‘they have lost
confidence in the mind’s authority over human life and its power to
find better ways for people to live’, and that the age therefore needs
‘Kant’s sober, principled hope for a more rational, cosmopolitan
future,’ I heartily endorse any attempt to explain human dignity
(worth) 3 and its central position in our Constitution in terms of
Kantian concepts. Kant, to my mind, musters the most powerful and
convincing secular arguments in support of human dignity being a
worth beyond price, and hence equal in and for all persons. I am
consequently in broad and fundamental agreement with Stu
Woolman’s Kantian approach to dignity under our Constitution. It is
within the context of such hearty agreement that I offer some ideas
in exchange, exposing these ideas themselves to critical refutation.
2 Whence dignity?
My first joust, offered as a playful opening to discussion, relates to
Woolman’s title ‘The widening gyre of dignity.’ I would suggest that
the falcon’s widening gyrations evoked by the title relates more
properly to the broadening of our understanding of human worth,
rather than to the nature and content of human worth itself.
Whatever lofty aspirations the falcon’s soaring may invoke, and such
aspirations are very important, I think we should also look downwards
and inwards, in an attempt to fathom what this uniqueness of human
personhood is. What is it about humans that raises them ‘above all
price and therefore admits of no equivalent,’ that projects them
beyond ‘merely a relative worth’ and sees them as having ‘inner
worth’?
I have previously offered the following tentative definition of
human worth (dignity):
[T]he human dignity (worth) of each and every person is the capacity for
and the right to respect as a human being that arise from all those
aspects of the human personality that flow from human intellectual and
moral capacity; which in turn separate humans from the impersonality of
nature, enables them to exercise their own judgment, to have self-
2
AW Wood Kant’s ethical thought (1999) xv.
3 It is clear that word ‘dignity’ is used in the Constitution as meaning ‘human
worth’. The Afrikaans text uses the word ‘menswaardigheid’ which means,
literally, ‘human worthiness’ and is also the exact equivalent of ‘Menschenwürde’
the word used in the German Basic Law. I say that it means ‘human worth’
because it is obviously something quite different from ‘dignity’ in the context of
social standing, rank, position or privilege. ‘Human worth’ clearly accords with
the Constitutional Court’s exposition of dignity.