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ABSTRACT. Modern human rights instruments ground human rights in the concept of human dignity, without providing an underlying theory of human dignity. This paper examines the central importance of human dignity, understood as not humiliating people, in traditional Jewish ethics. It employs this conception of human dignity to examine and criticize U.S. use of humiliation tactics and torture in the interrogation of terrorism suspects.
This paper originated as a lecture on Jewish ethics, in a series honoring the late philosopher Isaac Franck. My own writing has been almost entirely secular, and I am not a scholar of Jewish philosophy. Nevertheless, I have come to realize from the smatterings of Jewish law I have studied that my approach to many issues is very close in spirit to some central themes in Jewish ethics. This is specifically true of one of my themes in the present paper, the central ethical importance of respecting human dignity by not humiliating people-a theme, as I hope to show, that similarly occupies pride of place in rabbinic ethics. The particular context for my argument is a subject of surpassing current importance: the torture and degradation of detainees by the United States government in the "war on terror."
ROOSEVELT'S TEA PARTY
I begin with a famous story, almost a parable, about the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) (1948)-the first and most influential document for the contemporary human rights movement worldwide.
Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the U.N. committee charged with producing the UDHR, but the intellectual heavy lifting came from four other remarkable committee members: Rene Cassin, a French-Jewish jurist; John Humphrey, a Canadian lawyer; and two philosophy professors, P. C. Chang from China and Charles Malik, a Lebanese Christian.
Shortly after the process began, Eleanor Roosevelt hosted a tea party in her New York apartment, attended by Chang, Malik, and Humphrey. As she reports in her diary, Chang and Malik launched into a vigorous debate about the philosophical foundations of human rights. Chang favored a pluralist approach, while Malik took a more absolutist stance. Soon, the debate turned into a deep discussion of Aquinas and Confucius-and Roosevelt admits that by that point she was completely lost, and contented herself with refilling the teacups.
What Roosevelt discreetly left unsaid...