be futile to order someone to be virtuous: you cannot tell people to be good; you invite them to be good. Every example of virtue includes an invitation to do the same and to make it generalized. And naturally this is also true of the practical acts of dignity. But it is not true of that innate and original dignity that every human being possesses by the mere fact of being. One thing is what a person does, which can be worthy or unworthy (pragmatism) and another is what he or she is (ontology). And, as I have said before, the democratic concept of original, ontological dignity remains intact in spite of reiterated unworthy praxis. This dignity is not a fact, not even a moral fact, but a postulate, an attribution that, with the passage of time, has widened its subjective basis. This growth does not come about through an invitation, as in the case of virtue, but through scandal.
The witness of an action, which had been morally invisible in the past, surprises himself on contemplating with sorrow what he suddenly perceives to be an act of violation. At that moment, the witness has implicitly applied to the victim, and the group to whom the victim belongs, a dignity that tradition had obstinately refused to afford him. Novels in the nineteenth century, for example, familiarized readers of the time with the injustices suffered by abused women, abandoned children, impoverished masses, debtor prisoners, and exploited workers. These novels showed readers, for the first time, that sectors of the population who historically suffered discrimination possessed the same dignity as the privileged by highlighting the scandal produced by such wretched situations. In the majority of cases, dignity is recognized by its absence, when the respect due is missing, because it is then that unquestionable truths are clearly evident. And the feeling of scandal is not usually limited to benevolent compassion but sooner or later unleashes an active movement of social reform aimed at bringing to an end those situations of indignity that are now judged to be intolerable.
Egalitarian dignity has been ranked as sacrosanct, and yet it is no secret that, in fact, it continues to be violated a thousand times a day. However, there is an important difference between the violations of the past and those of today: the dignity of women, children, workers, or the poor may continue to be violated, but today no one can do so without degrading themselves. For centuries, a woman’s body, for example, could be constantly violated without punishment and even without reproach, because that action, given one name or another, or none, had become invisible in the normalcy of total masculine domination. Today, many women continue, unfortunately, to suffer violations, but now the violator can only carry out his repugnant act by degrading himself morally while creating revulsion around him and in himself too, if he is not totally corrupted.
The revulsion produced by indignity shows humanity the path towards moral progress.
A Conclusion and a Proposal: Cosmopolitan Dignity
Of all the human groups who have persistently suffered discrimination since the earliest times, one of the most affected has been foreigners. Over the centuries, law and civilization have made great strides of progress for those living within their own frontiers; but very often, those who were born outside those frontiers were, all too often, considered barbarians or savages and received the treatment accorded to slaves, an intermediate status between that of a human being and an animal. In this respect too, perspectives have evolved drastically in our time. Over the past few years, many voices have been raised to condemn the restrictive policies that Western governments have applied to migrants from other parts of the planet, who flee from war or poverty. They are indignant at the closure of frontiers or the expulsion of migrants, which they consider to be contrary to elementary humanitarian principles. The fact that their condemnation and anger are, in many cases, fully justified should not prevent us from seeing the unusual novelty that one and the other imply in strictly comparative terms: they both presuppose the tacit recognition, unprecedented in history, of the full dignity of all men and women without distinction as human beings, irrespective of whether they were born on one side of the border or the other.
The Spanish poet Antonio Machado formulates the original intuition with admirable precision when his character Juan de Mairena says: “No one is more than anyone else” (Machado 1986), which is same as saying that “however much a man is worth, there is nothing greater than his worth as a man.” The statement that “however much a man or a woman is worth, he or she has no greater worth than that of being a man or a woman” is the basis for the categorical statement I made earlier, that dignity is “unique, universal, anonymous, and abstract.” In effect, if there is no greater dignity than that of being a man or a woman, then all the other attributes (birth, sex, fatherland, religion, culture, race) on which a wide variety of ancient dignities were based in the past become mere accidents with no moral relevance and simply fade away. The difference between the president of the most powerful nation in the world and a homeless person, a migrant who swims across the sea to reach the promised land, or a person in prison for serious crimes is accidental, irrelevant, because there is nothing greater than common dignity. Though the variety of possible circumstances is humanly enriching, all individuals belong equally to the common lot of mortals.
It is often repeated that death is the great equalizer; but before death arrives, in our lifetime, we have all been made equal by our common dignity of origin.
Egalitarianism Leads Straight to Cosmopolitanism
The cosmopolitan ideal would like to see the establishment of a single citizenry for all the inhabitants of this global polis that is our planet. Before being a member of a state, a nation, or a country, each individual is firstly a citizen of the world. Because they belong to the same species, individuals have a generic citizenry from which are derived the rights that every state should always respect, even though the individual is not granted the citizenship that every state can give. Perhaps we will never attain and perhaps it may not even be desirable to attain the world state that Kant longed for (the world ruled by one universal government), but powerful tendencies can be seen on all sides that converge on the future construction of a cosmopolitan civil society.
In the final analysis, cosmopolitanism means simply that: there is only once race, the human race, and only one principle, individual dignity.
References
1 Craig, E. (ed.) (2000). Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New York: Routledge.
2 Ferrater Mora, J. (2009). Diccionario de filosofía. Barcelona: Ariel.
3 Kant, I. (1898). Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics. London: Longmans, Green, and Co.
4 Kant, I. (2008). Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals. New York: Cosimo.
5 Kapust, D. (2011). Cicero on decorum and the morality of rhetoric. European Journal of Political Theory 10 (1): 92–112.
6 Machado, A. (1986). Juan de Mairena 1 & 2. Madrid: Cátedra.
7 Petrarch. (1978). Obras I. Prosa, De los remedios contra la próspera y adversa fortuna. Madrid: Alfaguara.
8 Pinker, S. (2008). The stupidity of dignity. The New Republic (28 May).
3 Communication Rights in an Internet-Based Society Why Is the Principle of Universality So Important?1
Loreto Corredoira
The foundations of the universality of communication rights were laid down in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and confirmed in Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966. Both texts define three communication rights: seek, receive, and impart. These three activities are at the heart of how the Internet is used across the world today. These three facets of the right also shaped the discussion that took place at the World Summit on the Information Society (as stated in ITU 2003). This chapter discusses the threats to communication rights that originate from the Internet and its universal or mass nature. Though there are many such threats, they should not hinder efforts to ensure the universal application of these rights. The “universal subject” in the information