Dignity and the Limits of Liberal Individualism

Abstract

This article accords with recent liberal defenses of the political significance of dignity and the value in distinguishing between assaults on dignity and assaults on the body aimed at causing physical pain. However, it breaks with liberal individualist approaches in three ways. It shifts its focus of attention from the state to social groups as key sources of dignity injuries; from abstract individuals to collective identities as key targets and sufferers of dignity injuries; and from public points of contact between political regimes and their citizens to interior, intimate, and informal social spaces – some impenetrable by and/or unsuitable for legal intervention – as important theaters in which insults to dignity and struggles against those insults are played out.