In ‘Dignitas Infinita’, Catholic social teaching reaffirms the universal human rights tradition against its modern rivals

On April 8, 2024, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Roman Catholic Church launched its statement “Dignitas Infinita – About human dignity”. Most of the commentary surrounding the statement focused on some of the ethical issues highlighted in the document, such as surrogacy and the death penalty. Yet the most important contribution this document makes, both to the Church and to the world at large, is its presentation of what has been called a ‘third way’ of thinking about how our societies should be structured.

Through its office established to promote and protect Catholic Christian teaching, the Roman Catholic Church has once again strongly aligned itself with the post-World War II secular human rights vision presented in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the 1948 United Nations and the two subsequent Covenants – the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights – which came into force in 1976.

In doing so, the Church seeks to strike a balance between the extremes of individualism and collectivism, which had such a pronounced and often violent effect in the twentieth century and continues to shape so much political debate today.

The basis and nature of human dignity

Different conceptions of the human person may yield different conceptions of human dignity and the moral standards that flow from it. This is something that Dignitas Infinita attempts to address this by presenting the Catholic Church’s concept of the human person as a “correction” to other views that arguably reduce the human to some characteristic in a way that undermines the dignity of the multidimensional and complex relational beings who people are, undermine. The document is relatively consistent with the understanding of the dignity of the human person set out in the 1965 Pastoral Constitution of the Second Vatican Council on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium and Spesand traces this concept to its origins in the ‘personalist’ perspective in twentieth-century philosophy.

Dignitas Infinita articulates the Church’s theological reasons for asserting the dignity of each of these complex, multidimensional beings we call human beings. This consists of the twofold assertion that all human beings are created in the image of God, and that all human beings are united to God through the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Nevertheless, the document also argues that the recognition of the uniqueness and fundamental equality of every human being, and therefore of their dignity, can also be achieved with the help of human reason.

In short, according to Dignitas Infinitaevery human being – as a kind of being that is corporeal, rational, capable of free choice, historically situated and always in relation to all that exists – is, from conception to natural death, unique and fundamentally equal to every other human being. Consequently, every human being is the bearer of natural rights and responsibilities. Every human being is therefore a multidimensional whole: each of these dimensions of being human must be adequately taken into account when thinking about what is the morally right thing to do, and they must all be considered in an integral way.

Given this conformity to “reason,” it should come as no surprise Dignitas Infinita positively quotes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which has as its basis this statement:

All people are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and must act towards each other in a spirit of brotherhood.

Approximately the same claim underlies Dignitas Infinita – namely that all human beings are both individual subjects (possessing freedom, reason and conscience) and fundamentally relational, and therefore fundamentally equal in moral terms. It is on this basis that man has that rights (moral claims they can make on others and on society) and responsibilities (duties to others and society).

For both Dignitas Infinita and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, these rights and responsibilities are “natural”: they exist because of the kinds of beings that humans are, and thus continue to exist even when they are not recognized by others or by governments. They are rights to the things and circumstances that people have need to flourish as the kind of beings they are – or, to paraphrase theologian Karl Rahner, to become what they are by achieving their selfhood, collectively and individually, in knowledge and freedom.

This is a different view from that of rights existing only when formulated in law or based on wish fulfillment rather than needs. In Australia, for example, the right to dissolve the House of Representatives is reserved to the Crown, but this is not a natural human right. This also applies to the claim that I am entitled to a sports car, even if that is the case could be it is argued that I have the right to access to the means of transport necessary for my participation in society.

Dignitas Infinita urges us to think carefully about what we mean when we talk about ‘rights’, and affirms that only natural human rights can always exist for all people in all places and so must be respected accordingly, which is the source of our corresponding duties.

Neither individualism nor collectivism

The parallels between the concept of man presented in Dignitas Infinita and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are important to highlight because both documents argue that humans should be recognized as multidimensional beings who are both rational agents and beings always in relationship. Furthermore, both documents assert that there are objectively good things and conditions that are necessary for the flourishing of all people – and since all people have dignity, there are moral obligations to act accordingly.

This position provides an important counterbalance to the dangers of extreme individualism on the one hand and extreme collectivism on the other.

In the case of individualism, the most important characteristic of the human person is his autonomy, which must be respected above all. At its extreme, this view holds that everyone can choose to do whatever he or she wants, and that any restriction placed on their freedom is a violation of that person’s rights and dignity. There are no objective moral standards, only subjective ones: I alone decide what is morally good for me; only my choice counts.

At the other extreme are the kinds of collectivism seen in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. In such circumstances, a person’s value derives from his membership and role within the collective. Individuals don’t matter. All that matters is the ‘People’, the people, the nation – which is usually constituted by the exclusion of certain groups on the basis of race, religion, gender, nationality, migration status, moral behavior, stage of development, cognitive or physical. wealth, economic status, and so on. Individuals can be sacrificed for the good of the “group.” It is not their individual flourishing that counts, but only the flourishing of the whole. Even those within the collective can be sacrificed.

One of the consequences of both extreme individualism and extreme collectivism is a ‘different thinking’ of those who disagree with me or who are unnecessary to my group. The result is a society that can only talk about ‘us’ vs “them”, and thus loses sight of the “we”. When this happens, the dialogue descends into polemic and often into violence, as the dignity of the other is denied as it is dehumanized or demonized.

In Dignitas Infinita – as in recent official Catholic social teaching more broadly – ​​man is both a member of a group (which is not exclusive but includes all people), and a free individual who must work out his own flourishing. Individual freedom should not be exercised at the expense of the group, nor should the interests of the group outweigh the good of the individual, if we understand it correctly. As such, it is a valuable contribution to our understanding of human dignity in these polarized times.

David Kirchhoffer is director of the Queensland Bioethics Centre at the Australian Catholic University.