Abstract

I examine the standard view of dignity in Western literature and Metz’s African community view of dignity as a capacity for communal harmonious living. I argue that moral dignity is not just having a capacity for harmonious communal living, but the moral use of such capacity for the promotion of love, friendship, positive identity and active solidarity, which involves normatively prescriptive and evaluative elements. Thus, a plausible African communal conception of moral dignity, which is founded on a moral conception of personhood and community, involves a combination of capacity and agency that is conceptually tied to communal responsibility and respect for self and others. This indicates that human capacities do not have an inherent moral worth. Capacities are instrumentally good and their worth depends on how they are used to promote the moral good of communal well-being, on which individual well-being or dignity depends. This view captures the various use-senses of dignity, addresses many of the problems with many of the analyses of dignity in the literature, and also indicates its relevance.