Early defenders of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights invoked species hierarchy: human beings are owed rights because of our discontinuity with and superiority to animals. Subsequent defenders avoided species supremacism, appealing instead to conditions of embodied subjectivity and corporeal vulnerability we share with animals. In the past decade, however, supremacism has returned in work of the new ‘dignitarians’ who argue that human rights are grounded in dignity, and that human dignity requires according humans a higher status than animals. Against (...) the dignitarians, I argue that defending human rights on the backs of animals is philosophically suspect and politically self-defeating. (shrink)

Dignity underlies much philosophical debate, but the concept and its place in a broader theory of justice have received renewed analytic attention of late. In this article, I examine several recent books on dignity: Human Dignity and Political Criticism, by Colin Bird; Human Dignity and Human Rights, and Human Dignity and Social Justice, both by Pablo Gilabert; Contours of Dignity by Suzanne Killmister; and Humanity Without Dignity: Moral Equality, Respect, and Human Rights, by Andrea Sangiovanni. As I outline, each book (...) develops and defends a position in an established disagreement between so-called ‘Naturalistic’ views, which hold that dignity inheres in natural properties, and ‘Conventionalist’ perspectives, which hold that dignity is socially defined. With these contemporary accounts in mind, I expose the contours of this disagreement and suggest that further work should focus on developing a hybrid conception of dignity consistent with Naturalism and Conventionalism. (shrink)