Recent efforts to give positive content to the term “dignity" have focused on elucidating its relationship to human rights. Some of the leading interpretations of dignity in Anglo-American political philosophy—as deservingness, as equal high status, and as a touchstone for developing human capabilities—have been inattentive to the particular meanings that women invest in human dignity in the process of claiming rights that have been violated. Analyzing two reproductive rights claims that were brought before the Namibian Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights, I argue that human dignity is not reducible to a recognized warrant to demand a particular set of primary goods, services, or treatments. Rather, dignity in the contexts in which women experience abuse would be better characterized as a moral capacity for resistance to degradation. Drawing on Friedrich Schiller’s frequently-misunderstood interpretation of Kantian dignity, I offer an account of how political philosophy might learn to bear witness to the dignity of the “undeserving” person who claims her rights in protest against the lack of visibility of her embodied self as a subject of rights.
