Poverty: A Challenge to Human Dignity?

Abstract

How does the widespread phenomenon of poverty constitute a challenge to human dignity? This article argues firstly that a pervasive idea of human dignity, namely one that links dignity with autonomy, indeed evokes moral insights and guidance that are heavily challenged and contradicted by the pervasive reality of poverty. At the same time, however, the phenomenon of poverty reveals how this idea of human dignity creates problems of its own. Not only is it the origin of conflicting recommendations on poverty-combating policies and practices, depending on how dignity is linked with autonomy. Far more, a currently dominant trend in the conception of human dignity and autonomy, namely one that links dignity to self-determination, presupposes an ideal model of human life. As such, it becomes involved in practices of distinction whereby forms of life that fall short of this ideal model of a self-determining human life, are implicitly denigrated. A notion of human dignity that is grounded in human life's relational and multidimensional character, it is argued, will be less vulnerable to the accusations of implying such practices of differentiation, and better able to articulate dignity in relation to the concrete, bodily human life's various dimensions. Thus it is suggested that poverty might attain an epistemological function in relation to articulating human dignity. A final argumentative step suggests that exploring this epistemological significance of poverty might yield a deeper understanding of what it is to deny someone of human dignity.