The Right to Dignity Rex D. Glensy - Columbia Law School

2011] The Right to Dignity 127
problem that can act either through conscious application or else from
a subconsciously autoprogrammed source. Therefore, if the question
asked is whether “dignity [is] an independent attribute of personhood,
or . . . a part of personhood related to, derived from, and/or a part of
autonomy, liberty, equality,” 282 the answer which the proxy approach
responds is “the latter.”
The proxy approach feeds on the natural affinity between
human dignity and other rights that are associated with valuing
personhood and that, perhaps, are more familiar within American
legal culture. This familiarity, in turn, should comfort actors in the
U.S. legal system because the solicitation of dignitary interests would
always be subsumed within rights or causes of action that are deeply
rooted within American tradition, such as equal protection and due
process on the rights side, or defamation and trademark infringement
on the rights of action side. Another motivation for the proxy
approach is related to the general unease with the metamorphic
character of dignity rights, which causes the proxy approach to take
many different shapes in those occasions when it is deployed. Clearly,
cultural inputs have to a large extent gone into the attempt to better
understand the concept of human dignity, which has inevitably led to
the significant divergence of opinion illustrated in Part II above.
Therefore, a solution that lends itself better to assimilation with
currently existent American jurisprudence would seem ideal, if one
accepts the premise of a jurisprudential role for the right to dignity in
some form. In this light, the heuristically sensitive approach to the
right to dignity might better comport with the traditional
understanding of rights as theorized since the very beginning of
American legal thought. For example, Thomas Hobbes and John
Locke envisioned society as being comprised of autonomous
individuals left free to lead their lives to the best of their abilities. 283
It then follows that “[w]hat citizens modeled on this image need to be
282. Resnik & Suk, supra note 68, at 1929; see also McAllister, supra note
209, at 503 (“[c]ertainly, notions of equality and liberty are intimately linked to
human dignity”).
283. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan 74 (Edwin Curley ed., Hackett
Publishing 1994) (1651); John Locke, Second Treatise of Government 8, §4 (C.B.
Macpherson ed., Hackett Publishing 1980) (1690); see also Gunner Myrdal, An
American Dilemma, The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy 4 (2d ed. 1944)
(“These ideals of the essential dignity of the individual human being, of the
fundamental equality of all men, and of certain inalienable rights to freedom,
justice, and a fair opportunity represent to the American people the essential
meaning of the nation’s early struggle for independence.”).