Can We Do Ethics Without Dignity? Kierkegaard's Works of Love as a Test Case

Abstract: This paper offers a novel contribution to the conversation about the centrality of dignity to ethics by exploring the ethics of love in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love as a model for an approach to health care ethics that does not depend on that concept. Over the last century, dignity has proved an immensely attractive concept, in both religious and secular contexts, due to its promise to ground such notions as the equality, inviolability, and rights of human—and perhaps other—persons. It has not been without its critics, however. As the first step of my argument, I develop a challenge to the concept of dignity, as it is frequently used in clinical ethics, by analyzing it as a moral fiction, in the sense described by MacIntyre in After Virtue. In the next step, I consider Kierkegaard’s Works of Love as a test case of an ethical model that entails characteristics promised by dignity—such as, among others, the equality of human persons—without making dignity a central concept, and I demonstrate its applicability to health care ethics. In a final step, I conclude that the answer to the title question depends on a distinction. Kierkegaard’s ethics can be read as an alternative to dignity-centered perspectives in one commonly accepted sense of the word; but it can also be read as refining, rather than eliminating, the concept of dignity, by situating it firmly in the context of a relational and theological account of the self.