Most humans are intuitively attracted to the idea of dignity. We want to claim it and to have it.
We also tend to misinterpret it.
We have confused it with earned respect.1 We have confused it with charity. We have confused it with winning and wealth. We have reduced it to a sentiment, a vibe, a line on a corporate values poster, right between “innovation” and “synergy.”
But unless dignity is reflected in humans being treated as beings of unconditional worth, that values poster has nothing to do with real dignity. It is just decoration.
Dignity Is Not Earned
The first and most consequential error is that we treat dignity as though it were a reward. A performance bonus, earned, chased after, and doled out to those who have demonstrated sufficient productivity. Grabbed along with power.
The logic runs like this: You have proven your value; therefore, you deserve to be treated as fully human.
Wait, what? Why should humans earn being treated like humans?
Immanuel Kant saw this back in 1785. In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals2, he drew a distinction that still matters more than almost anything written since.
- Things have a price. Price means that something can be exchanged, substituted, or replaced with an equivalent.
- Persons, however, have “inner worth” or dignity. Persons are not interchangeable or replaceable; they have no equivalent. A person is an end in themselves, not a means to an end, and should not be used as a means to an end.
A person is not a means for parents to live through, not a means to a corporate quarterly target or any other end set by others. A person is an end in themselves. Full stop.
Kant was trying to articulate something most of us feel in our bones but struggle to defend when systems squeeze us in their tentacles: Our worth as human beings is not up for negotiation. It arrives with us. It does not need to be earned because it cannot be earned, any more than we can earn being born.
I know many people have spent years in systems, relationships, or organizations that taught them the opposite: That their dignity was conditional. That they have to keep earning and earning it again.
Teaching us that our dignity is conditional is, of course, convenient for those who seek to manipulate us. Even if it sucks the soul out of us.
Dignity Is Not Niceness
The second error is subtler, and it trips up many kind, well-meaning people. We have collapsed honoring dignity into niceness, into civility: the tone, the politeness, the elaborate choreography of making everyone feel comfortable at all times.
But honoring dignity and preserving comfort are not the same thing. Dignity sometimes requires the profoundly uncomfortable act of telling someone the truth. It requires a school principal to say, This policy is harming students. It requires a manager who looks at the executive team and says, We are breaking promises, and the people who trusted us deserve to know why, and not be gaslit.
Kant would recognize this. Treating someone as an end in themselves also means honoring their connection to reality. Niceness without honesty threatens all of our dignity.
Honoring Dignity Is Structural
Here is the error that matters whether we design, lead, or inhabit an organization or a system: We keep treating honoring dignity as an individual phenomenon when it is, largely, a systemic and structural one.
Honoring dignity is a principle that a system either upholds or violates. It lives in policies, in feedback structures, in how time is used. It lives in leadership.3 It lives in whether the organization’s stated values can survive contact with its actual incentive structures. It lives in who gets to speak, who only gets spoken about, and who is silenced. (I discuss this in depth in my book, The Canary Code: A Guide to Neurodiversity, Dignity, and Intersectional Belonging at Work.)
We are born with dignity, yet we must continuously check if our systems are compatible with it.
If Kant were alive today, he might have asked, Do your systems make it possible to treat humans as ends in themselves?
Because that systemic treatment of humans as ends in themselves is the true test of dignity. Everything else, however carefully worded and skillfully broadcast, is décor.