Human Dignity? Calm Down. You Can't Shoot Them All

Travelling through Germany by train may take extra time, or worse. Trying to get back to the Netherlands from Cologne (a wonderful city indeed) one late afternoon, this rail traveller received wonderful assistance from a counter clerk beleaguered by angry customers. On her desk was a mug with the words: ‘Calm down. You can't shoot them all’. For this and other reasons (some self-interest among them) your up-to-then duly delayed present writer – and waiting again for some time for his turn at the desk – did his best to be as friendly as possible. This had a not completely surprising effect: the clerk's face cleared up, no doubt after a long day of being more or less continuously harassed. Her assistance was as wonderfully friendly as it was effective. So home was reached the same day after all, with a lesson on dignity learnt one more time. A fellow human being, however anonymous, was on the other side of the desk, not a foe responsible for the sometimes-disappointing failures of German rail transport. This is respecting human dignity in practice, to such good effect for all concerned.

The value of human dignity is not limited to its fragmentary realization in railway communication, of course. It must be something quite important and elevated in general. Still the concept is not clear and uncontested, thus lacking clear legal and moral implications as well. Human dignity cannot be some or other matter of fact anyway, ‘out there’ to be discovered by painstaking research. It is an evaluative and normative issue, thus lending itself to endless conflicts of more or less learned opinion rooted in conflicting views of man, the end or ends of life, the world and God(s).

So human dignity is an essentially practical notion, to be duly acted upon, here, now, whenever and wherever. So why not step down (for a while) from the high grounds or just thin air of philosophy and theology and ask what can be done to protect human dignity (whatever it may be in the end) in daily life? What can we do about it? This must seem a paradoxical or even contradictory enterprise, in deriving means to an unclear or even unknown end, or drawing a road map for a will-o’-the wisp.