Granting worth and dignity. (LETTERS to the Editor).

I'd like to revisit Michael Werner's inspiring article, "An Idea That Counts," in the January/February 2001 Humanist. Despite its merits, still, the basic idea has a side that is deeply troubling: the implications of "affirming the inherent, equal worth and dignity of each individual, regardless of her or his behavior" (I have combined several quotes into the one put together here). Werner quotes Elie Weisel as supporting this thesis. I wonder. Let's look more closely.

Would Wiesel actually rate the worth and dignity (in a moral sense) of Hitler as equal with that of each Jewish man, woman, boy, or girl tortured and killed in the Holocaust? Should we consider John Wayne Gacy morally equal in worth and dignity to each of his more than thirty victims whom he abused sexually and then murdered? Were the bombers who killed the three black children in that Birmingham, Alabama, church individually equal in moral worth and dignity as their little victims?

Just think critically about this principle ("idea") even though it has a place in the Unitarian Universalist list of principles as things believed in.

The idea has an important range of application. Human beings should be considered born with a potential for equal worth and dignity, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, economic status, religious commitment, and the rest--but also with the potential for forfeiting that status if their behavior shows them to be enemies of humanity.

As Werner points out, the practice and attitudes of war often dehumanize enemies, turning them (in our thoughts and attitudes) into so-called gooks, Japs, and the like. But this is the distortion of an important, valid ethical truth. Some human behavior is to be recognized as inhuman and the perpetrators appropriately so classified as evil and of negative moral worth.

C. Lee Hubbell
Chicago, IL