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I have long argued that we want to create health so we can create opportunities for people to live, rather than the other way around. But this definition elides something important: I think our role is not simply to use health to help people to live, but to help people to live dignified lives. This is consistent with centering health as a human right, an idea that has emerged as a strong thread in the health literature over the past few decades. But, separate and apart from that, I argue that we should be advocating for dignity as the ultimate role of health very much for its own sake. Toward this aspiration, I will here reflect a bit on dignity—what it is and why it should be the central goal of our pursuit of health.
Let me start by asking: What do we mean by dignity? The Cambridge Dictionary defines dignity as “the importance and value that a person has, that makes other people respect them or makes them respect themselves.” This seems a good working definition, emphasizing as it does the fundamental, intrinsic value of all people, of which dignity is a reflection and an acknowledgment. This concept, so central to our modern framing of human rights, is, it is important to remember, fairly new in human history. For much of our species’ past, life was seen as cheap, and the course of human events was one of conquest, with the strong dominating the weak. This reflects the slow process by which a recognition emerged that dignity is an inherent human quality that must be respected.
This evolution in thinking intersected with a range of religious and philosophical traditions, from the Christian concept of dignity rooted in the fundamental sacredness of human life created in the image of God to the Confucian concept of dignity based on the moral potential of every human to be a good person. Such traditions have informed our contemporary notions of dignity, rooting them in a vision of the world in which the fundamental worth of every human being is celebrated and protected. Because dignity is a human universal, it has the power to help us transcend the forces that can divide us so that we engage on equal terms in the work of creating a better present and future.
Why Dignity Should Be the Ultimate Goal of Health
These concepts of dignity reflect why we should want to pursue dignity as a general good. But why, specifically, should we center supporting human dignity as the ultimate goal of health? Fundamentally, a dignified life means that persons can live how they wish to live, even as we may need to tolerate disagreement about how some wish to live. But to live how they wish to live, people are best served by not being encumbered by poor health. Hence, our work on health is indeed creating the right pathway for people to live in line with their own desires, with the dignity that allows them to do so. Ensuring that all can be as healthy as possible for as long as possible is an ineluctable pathway to that.
Building a world where a dignified life is possible for all also calls for us to ask, always: What are we trying to achieve in health, and what is the world like for those who cannot achieve all that others can because of non-improvable health challenges? This means that health takes a front-and-center role in creating pathways for the self-actualization of all, regardless of capacity, physical or otherwise. This implies creating a different form of society than one, say, where we advocate for pathways to achievement only for those who can already do more or less all they want to do. Rather, it is on us to make a world where there are multiple pathways that recognize multiple capacities.
Creating these pathways starts with seeing where they are lacking, and this means doing a better job of truly seeing other people. We live in an increasingly atomized world, where it is perhaps easier than ever to see only what we want to see, to neglect the dignity of others, to seal ourselves off from people from very different walks of life. Forces like technology, partisanship, and even geography can all support this willful shutting of our eyes to the wider world. But we can make a choice, in this moment, to use the tools at our disposal to connect with others, to really see them, and, in doing so, to create a world that centers dignity. Rather than let the distractions of the world blind us to the lives of those who are different from us, we should see them, see how they are not well served by the status quo, and commit to creating a world where difference does not mean indignity.
How We Can Center Dignity in the Pursuit of Health
What, then, are the practical implications of centering dignity in our pursuit of health? What does a concern for dignity urge us to do in our work? First, centering dignity calls on us to judge our efforts not just by how well they prevent disease, but by whether they remain focused on the unique needs and perspectives of the communities with which we engage. Our efforts should reflect an ongoing dialogue with these communities so we never do anything that does not take into account the full humanity of the people we are trying to help.
Second, a concern for dignity means centering dignity in all we do, recognizing that just as dignity is a universal human characteristic, it should be universally applicable in our work. This means asking ourselves at every turn if what we are doing does indeed support the dignity of all, and being honest with ourselves when our efforts fall short.
Third, centering dignity means, unavoidably, pursuing health as a human right, with all this entails for how we think about health and how we work to build a healthier world. It means maintaining a radical vision of a healthier future, even as we pursue this vision pragmatically and incrementally. Such a vision recognizes that we are not healthy until we are all healthy and that our efforts are incomplete if anyone is denied the dignity that health enables.
A version of this post also appears on Substack.
