Overture ・ Being ・ Order ・ Choice ・ Relation ・ Field Guide
Substantive dignity guards the soul of law—but when the state claims to own that soul, dignity becomes disguise.
I. Definition — Dignity as Moral Architecture
If inherent dignity says you matter, substantive dignity says the government gets to decide how you should matter. It’s when the state claims not just to recognize your worth, but to protect it by telling you what a dignified life looks like.
This is dignity as command: the idea that law should preserve certain moral standards, shield people from degradation, even enforce virtue “for their own good.” Where inherent dignity is about recognition, substantive dignity is about prescription—what you should do, what you shouldn’t be allowed to choose, what counts as living properly.
At its heart, substantive dignity sees dignity as something society upholds collectively rather than something you carry individually. The government becomes the guardian of what it means to be human. Law becomes the house built to preserve humanity’s image of itself—but the state gets to decide what that image should be.
II. In Law and Politics — The State as Guardian of Dignity
Germany’s approach shows this most clearly. The German Constitutional Court interprets its constitution’s dignity clause—”Human dignity shall be inviolable”—as giving the state authority not just to respect your dignity, but to protect it from you.1 German law has used this reasoning to ban certain forms of punishment, prohibit people from selling organs or agreeing to certain medical experiments, and restrict hate speech and pornography.
The logic: the state can stop you from doing things that, even if you consent, “demean the human condition.” Your dignity becomes something the government protects even against your own choices. The European Court of Human Rights has used similar reasoning in cases about assisted suicide, prostitution, and bioethics—dignity as both protection and limitation.2
This appeals to people who worry about moral decay—who think some choices, some expressions, some ways of living are so degrading that society shouldn’t allow them even if individuals consent. It’s the belief that freedom without moral boundaries destroys what makes us human. The government becomes the guardian not just of your safety, but of your soul.
III. Shortcomings – When Protection Becomes Possession
Here’s the problem: when the state claims authority to define dignity, it claims authority to define you.
Legal theorists Roger Brownsword and Deryck Beyleveld caution that when states claim to protect dignity, they risk “appropriating the concept as a license to moralize,” defining for everyone what counts as being human.3 The same principle that protects against cruelty can be used to forbid freedom. The government that claims to guard your dignity from degradation also gets to decide what counts as degradation.
History is full of this pattern. Dignity gets invoked to ban books, censor art, control women’s bodies, suppress minorities, criminalize poverty. Always with the same justification: we’re protecting human worth. But who decides what’s worthy? The powerful. And they tend to find that dignity looks a lot like conformity to their values.
When dignity becomes a moral template instead of a shared condition, it stops being about equality and becomes about hierarchy: the dignified and the undignified, the proper and the improper, the pure and the profane. Women get controlled “for their dignity.” Minorities get silenced “for unity.” The poor get punished “for order.”
But dignity is supposed to be inherent—something you possess by existing. When the state prescribes what dignity looks like, it becomes something bestowed, something conditional. You have dignity if you live the way the government approves. It becomes, in a sense, control wearing dignity’s mask.
IV. Reflection — The Covenant’s Moral Boundary
The Covenant learns from substantive dignity’s insight—that law must protect against harm—without accepting its paternalism. It recognizes that some things violate dignity regardless of consent. But it draws a crucial line: the Covenant forbids harm to life, not ways of living.
Look at the Covenant’s prohibitions: torture, discrimination, surveillance that strips privacy, exploitation that treats people as resources, domination in any form. These aren’t moral judgments about how you should live. They’re boundaries against what cannot be done to you or to anyone.
Where governments have used dignity to justify controlling people “for their own good,” the Covenant uses dignity to stop anyone—including governments—from treating people as objects. It transforms substantive dignity from moral prescription (the state defining proper life) into ethical limit (no one gets to violate another’s worth, period).
This is the crucial difference: the Covenant doesn’t tell you what dignity looks like for you. It tells everyone—governments, corporations, other people—what they cannot do to you in dignity’s name. The boundary faces outward, not inward.
That’s why the Covenant refines substantive dignity rather than rejecting it. To see how protection serves without control, we turn to dignity of choice.
The Covenant turns the idea of dignity into living law—a constitution for all people, grounded in worth, care, and freedom.
Read it for yourself and see what lawful power can be when it serves life.
Bundesverfassungsgericht [Federal Constitutional Court], 30 BVerfGE 1 (1970) (Lebach Case) and related jurisprudence interpreting Art. 1 of the Basic Law.
European Court of Human Rights, Pretty v. United Kingdom, No. 2346/02 (2002); Laskey, Jaggard and Brown v. United Kingdom, Nos. 21627/93 et al. (1997).
Roger Brownsword & Deryck Beyleveld, Human Dignity in Bioethics and Biolaw (Oxford Univ. Press 2001).