The full story of dignity is extremely complicated and the picture often handsomely confused.

It was deemed impracticable, therefore, within the bounds of this volume to trace every shift in the development of secular thought concerning dignity; only episodes informing the course of the present study are afforded space. The decision to leave on one side religious and legal concerns was taken, regrettably, on the grounds of economy of scale. The first draft of this book incorporating such domains of influence, as well as a more extended historical contextualization, stretched to twice the size of the present volume. What has been gathered from the cutting- room floor will now have to wait for a later airing. Although it is not the intention to confront the issue of human rights, or natural law, for that matter, fully head on, both concerns inevitably tend to ‘shadow’ any ongoing discussion of dignity and will need to be brought to light when the context requires it. There have been other reasons for economy in coverage, most notably, when the decision was taken to just not ‘go there’. For example, there has been some debate in the literature about the merits of the case for ‘the evolution of ethics’ and, for that matter, ‘the ethics of evolution’ (see Raphael 1994, 115– 29). At its most perfunctory, this might be taken to mean that ethics have just developed over time in the case of the former premise and that evolution is largely a good thing in the case of the latter. Moreover, as an adjunct to this kind of thinking, there has been debate as to whether certain moral or ethical states have sired others such as sympathy coming to be an impulsion for conscience. Such endeavour, apart from being highly speculative, is inordinately time consuming to no conclusive end, so mention, here, of any ‘evolutionary’ correlation of concepts is made only where it has quite obvious relevance. As it turns out, any tracing of the ‘evolution’ of dignity over historical time or its bearing on other concepts fashions a tapestry whereby the stitches are made largely of threads of supposition.