Dignity Is Distinct From Respect: How Treating Others With Dignity Entails Accounting for Their Self-Conscious Emotions

Dignity is prominently endorsed in health care, organizations, and law. However, humanities research casts doubt over the utility of this concept, disputing that "dignity" captures any unique ethical value distinguishable from "respect". Here, we test a recent proposal that dignity entails special regard for humiliation. We created a set of vignettes describing a "perpetrator" making offensive remarks or gestures to a "victim", and asked lay participants to rate how well each offense corresponds to a dignity violation as opposed to a respect violation. We manipulated the victims' resulting emotions within-subject, across "humiliation", "anger", and "baseline" conditions, while controlling for other factors (e.g., victim's gender, vulnerability). We found substantial evidence (BF = 4.11) for our preregistered hypothesis that humiliation increased dignity-relatedness ratings as compared with the baseline condition, and very strong evidence when compared with the anger condition (BF = 84.75). These findings provide empirical backing to dignitarian ethics with applications in health care, organizations, and law.