I think when people invoke the term dignity they sort of circumvent describing the issue in actual detail. Most “indignities” can be described in concrete terms, which can then be addressed, such as the inconvenience of not having toilets available, the aversiveness of having to deal with an unfriendly or incompetent government official, etc.. Some interventions require disregarding a number of preferences of those that they are ultimately aimed to help. Having “dignity” be a requirement would make that difficult or impossible.
Thanks Wolf. The reason I think to speak about dignity as a general phenomenon rather than a series of concrete indignities is that there are so many possible different indignities, which are very context dependent—but there is a sufficient similarity between how those different indignities are experienced to make them worthwhile capturing under one category. Therefore we can offer measures that are appropriate to many situations without having to come up with different specific survey questions for every different possible indignity.
To your second point, I would argue for including measures of respect not because we should always and everywhere maximize respect at the expense of other goals, but rather because by measuring it we can make informed judgments about those tradeoffs. My prior is that we would find ways of being more respectful that did not sabotage other goals, but we won’t know until we measure.
I think when people invoke the term dignity they sort of circumvent describing the issue in actual detail. Most “indignities” can be described in concrete terms, which can then be addressed, such as the inconvenience of not having toilets available, the aversiveness of having to deal with an unfriendly or incompetent government official, etc.. Some interventions require disregarding a number of preferences of those that they are ultimately aimed to help. Having “dignity” be a requirement would make that difficult or impossible.
Thanks Wolf. The reason I think to speak about dignity as a general phenomenon rather than a series of concrete indignities is that there are so many possible different indignities, which are very context dependent—but there is a sufficient similarity between how those different indignities are experienced to make them worthwhile capturing under one category. Therefore we can offer measures that are appropriate to many situations without having to come up with different specific survey questions for every different possible indignity.
To your second point, I would argue for including measures of respect not because we should always and everywhere maximize respect at the expense of other goals, but rather because by measuring it we can make informed judgments about those tradeoffs. My prior is that we would find ways of being more respectful that did not sabotage other goals, but we won’t know until we measure.