Essay
Comment
Justice
5 min read

Dignity: why people matter

How dignity underlies our ethics and law.

Professor Charles Foster is a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and a member of the Oxford Law Faculty.

A pupil in a classroom looks around and into the camera.
Indus Action

You think that you matter: that you are significant. I agree with you. I think the same about myself.

We all think we are significant, and that our significance requires us to behave and to be treated in particular ways. One of the main functions of the law (perhaps the function of the law) is to regulate this sense of significance: to protect my sense of my significance and to stop it interfering with the sense of significance that others have.

A common name given to this sense of significance is dignity. It is a defining characteristic of humans. We see it as soon as we see behaviourally modern humans – who came on the scene about 45,000 years ago. We laid our dead tenderly in the earth, clutching flowers and amulets, rather than leaving them out as food for hyenas. We carved our faces into mammoth ivory because we knew that there was something about our faces which should endure. We believed that we had souls and that other things, human and non-human did too. This made eating other ensouled things a real problem. We evolved solemn liturgies of oblation and satisfaction to solve it. Our walk through life and death was elaborately choreographed, because it wasn’t proper to stomp and blunder. Comportment mattered because we mattered.

These were astonishing assertions – so astonishing that no big society has ever taken them completely seriously.

Jumping from pre-history to history, dignity, like other precious resources, was appropriated by the rulers, who said that they and only they had a right to it. The hoi polloi never truly believed this; they knew their own worth and moral weight. But the rulers told an artful story. The gods had dignity, they said, and the gods gave it to their favoured ones – typically the royals and the heroes. The royals were the gods’ embodiments or regents, and so the thrones of Mesopotamia and Egypt were invested and affirmed by divine dignity. The capricious gods of Olympus gave dignity at particular times and for particular purposes to their particular favourites, who therefore became demi-gods for a while.

In the Hebrew world, however, a radically democratic move was afoot. God was indeed dignified, but since every human was made in his image, all humans were dignified too – and in the same way as God. The idea was picked up by St Paul: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek’, he declared. ‘There is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus’.

These were astonishing assertions – so astonishing that no big society has ever taken them completely seriously.

The obscenity of Auschwitz relegated the hyper-spiritualised notion of dignity to the cloister, and Kant’s notion to the Academy. For whatever dignity was, it was outraged there, and the outrage extended to bodies and to the non-rationally-autonomous.

Less ambitious, and so more palatable, was Stoicism’s rather anaemic version of the Imago Dei. All humans were potentially dignified, it said, and each human had a duty to strive to realise their dignified potential. It was much less radical than the Judaeo-Christian conception, but still represented a tectonic break with the royal theocracies of Mesopotamia, Egypt and elsewhere.

This Stoical conception of dignity did useful work. It served to save the notion of dignity from two mortal threats - both, embarrassingly, from the Christian world (though Kant’s relationship with Christian orthodoxy was sometimes uneasy).

There is a strand of Platonised Christianity (drawing on the early Augustine)  that spiritualises the idea of dignity. If it prevailed dignity would have nothing to say in hospitals about bowels or bedpans, in bedrooms about sex, in plantations about slavery, in jungles about the fate of trees or toucans, or in newsrooms about anything at all.

Kant located dignity in rational autonomy, so snatching dignity from children, the demented, the unconscious, the depressed, everyone who has drunk a bottle of red wine, and more or less everyone who doesn’t have a PhD in philosophy.

The obscenity of Auschwitz relegated the hyper-spiritualised notion of dignity to the cloister, and Kant’s notion to the Academy. For whatever dignity was, it was outraged there, and the outrage extended to bodies and to the non-rationally-autonomous.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War dignity (almost always undefined) appeared in endless national and international laws and declarations. Fairly recently it has started to have a real legal life of its own, being invoked for many purposes, from prisoners’ rights to reproduce to the right to have your name on your tombstone in the language of your choice.

These specific invocations of dignity sometimes disguise its foundational nature – foundational to human nature itself and to the laws that seek to determine how humans should conduct themselves in society

To say that the Judaeo-Christian account of dignity gives rise to all ethics and law in the western world is a big claim. I make it unapologetically.

To see how foundational it is, ask yourself why you think it is wrong to kick a child, but not a rock. Or why it is wrong to play football with a human head, or do an intimate examination, for the purposes of teaching medical students, on a woman in a permanent vegetative state. In describing the wrongness you will certainly find yourself relying on something that looks suspiciously like human dignity.

The law is often said to be protecting interests other than dignity (such as autonomy, freedom, or bodily integrity), or promoting other values (such as beneficence or non-maleficence). Yet on close inspection, those interests and values will all turn out to be parasitic on dignity. Dignity is the first order principle: the others stem from it.

In the last forty or so years there has been a good deal of academic discussion about just what ‘dignity’ means. There is a growing consensus that it has two complementary parts. First: an inalienable element: the intrinsic dignity possessed simply and solely by reason of being human. This cannot be lost or diminished. It just is. And second, a dignity which is a consequence of the first, but denotes how, in the light of your dignified nature, you should comport yourself. If we say of someone ‘She’s let herself down’, we mean that she has failed to behave with the dignity expected of someone who has the high status of being human.

This account of dignity is derived straight from the notion of the Imago Dei, and from Paul’s gloss. The watered-down Stoical version simply gives encouragement to behave well: it has nothing akin to the inalienable element.

To say that the Judaeo-Christian account of dignity gives rise to all ethics and law in the western world is a big claim. I make it unapologetically. Perhaps you think that it is too extravagant. But it is plain enough that this account, or one of its iterations outside the sphere of Judaeo-Christian influence (there are several), accords as does no other with our intuitions about ourselves and about how we should act, and with the most fundamental axioms of the laws in all tolerable jurisdictions. The most enlightened parts of Enlightenment thinking originate in this account, though they are often embarrassed to admit it.

Whatever we mean by the Rule of Law, part of it is that no one is above or outside it: Jews and Greeks, and bond and free, and male and female are to be treated alike. We’re so used to the idea that we have forgotten its revolutionary roots.

Essay
Comment
Community
Nationalism
7 min read

I was angry and you called me Gammon: Gary from Blackpool, Charlie Kirk, and all these flags

A triptych of three faces of wrath poorly heard and poorly expressed

John is a Salvation Army officer and theologian,

Marchers carry British, English and Israeli flags
Unite the Kingdom marchers.
Met Police.

William Blake once warned: 

I was angry with my friend; 
I told my wrath, my wrath did end. 
I was angry with my foe: 
I told it not, my wrath did grow. 

Blake understood that unspoken—and, more precisely, unheard—wrath does not wither. Left untended, it grows. Its bitter roots tentacle around grievance; neglect waters it, and violence ripens as its fruit. Much like Blake’s tree, the wrath spreading through towns in this nation, and beyond, springs from seeds of anger. It is not irrational. It is cultivated in betrayal, frustration, and systemic disregard. 

This essay is a triptych. Three panels, three faces of wrath poorly heard and poorly expressed. In England, it riots in the streets and hangs from lamp posts. In America, it narrows into bullets. These are not isolated curiosities but variations on the same Western fracture — anger left unheard, curdling until it explodes. 

Wrath, of course, is not the same as anger. Anger is a natural passion, a flare of the soul in the face of injury or injustice. It can be righteous when governed by love, as even Christ was angry at hardened hearts. Wrath, by contrast, is anger left to harden — anger unspoken, unheard, or indulged until it festers into a vice. Scripture names it as both the fire of God’s judgement and, in humanity, a deadly sin. Wrath is anger that has ceased to heal and has become scar tissue. 

Panel I: Gary from Blackpool 

Enter “Gary from Blackpool”. 

He was a London commentator’s caricature of provincial ignorance—“1 GCSE, two brain cells, and three teeth.” 

A screenshot of a tweet.

The tweet was deleted, but not before the sneer had spread. Gary was a meme. He doesn’t exist, and yet he does; there are loads of “Garys” in Blackpool. 

And Gary is angry. 

His wrath first erupted in St John’s Square in the summer of 2024. When he raised a St George’s flag on a roundabout, it was not swaggering nationalism but a pathetic attempt to claim a place in a nation that no longer cares about people like him. 

Blackpool’s collapse has been much-storied: once thriving, now one of the most deprived. Reports and documentaries measure poverty, chart prospects, and speculate on futures. The town is endlessly narrated. 

Gary is not. 

Yet his story mirrors that oft-told collapse. Poverty has scarred him visibly: the teeth, failing health. Gary’s life expectancy: 69, more than a decade shorter than elsewhere. He’s scarred invisibly too, in narrowed hopes and disillusion. These are not individual failings but markers of systemic neglect: underfunded schools, crumbling services, an NHS that doesn’t reach him. Dentist appointments in Blackpool are rarer than hens’ teeth, which are in better condition than Gary’s. 

The England Gary remembers is gone. In its place stands a society he no longer recognises: multicultural, politically sensitive, shifting away from its past. A Daily Mail headline once told him, “Garys are heading for extinction” while Muhammad, in all its spelling variants, had become the most common baby name

And then the boats. Images looping on his screen: more change he cannot control. His Brexit vote promised to take back control; his refusal to vote ever again, a gesture of resignation. 

Because they don’t care about him. They hadn’t even cared for the girls. Now he saw the same system ushering them into clinics to become boys. 

Gary and those like him, through their anger, reveal a politics that has abandoned them, economics that offer no hope, and a culture that makes them strangers in their own country. Rioting is no cure; it tears open wounds without healing. But the response is illuminating: in 2011, they prompted soul-searching; in 2024 and 2025, they brought only ridicule. The tweet exposed a national reflex: to mock rather than listen. That sharpened the bitterness. 

Wrath here does not whisper or wait. It riots. 

 

Panel II: Charlie Kirk 

Gary may never have heard of Charlie Kirk, but Kirk’s rhetoric channelled the very anxieties that defined Gary’s world—about loss, displacement, and neglect. This resonance helps explain how his voice travelled so widely. 

I didn’t watch Charlie Kirk either. His reels surfaced on Instagram or YouTube now and then, but it wasn’t my algorithm that latched onto him. It was my four nephews’—aged sixteen to twenty-two, two in Kent, two in New Zealand—imagination he captured, even if not always their agreement. Young men across the globe, caught in the fast cadence of an American voice. 

When I saw the news, my reaction surprised me. It was strangely visceral for someone who had never featured in my life in the way he had theirs. I felt sick. Because he was dead. Because he wasn’t a politician behind glass or a general behind medals. He was public, certainly, but also strangely normal. And he had children, both younger than my youngest, and a wife. 

And he had the guts to speak to people. Theo Von said he “tweeted with his feet.” How many of us can say we say what we believe as vociferously face to face as we might be brave enough to do on social media? He was visible. Accessible. Flesh and blood with people, not just pixels. I think this is partly why he appealed to my nephews. I’ve seen Facebook friends of their generation posting tributes, then engaging courteously and constructively with those who insisted on quoting Kirk out of context. For them, defending him has not been rage but dialogue. 

And then the gun. 

Charlie’s killer pulled a trigger. Wrath had narrowed into single, precise bullets with slogans on them. But this was not justice, not even protest. It was wrath corrupted into murder; an execution. 

Wrath here does not riot. It narrows into bullets. It turns cannibal. 

What will this spilt blood birth in those who listened, watched, believed? 

 

Panel III: Flags in Hartlepool and Horden 

And here, in England, it is the flags. 

In America, flags are furniture. They’re on every porch, every school, every stadium. But in Hartlepool and Horden, when flags multiply on streetlights, and red crosses are painted onto white roundabouts, they do not feel ordinary. They are a display of patriotism that feels out of character here. They feel ominous. 

They do not shout; they whisper. Every day. A slow, stubborn signal of belonging and defiance. Not the riot of Gary. Not the bullet for Charlie. But something quieter, somehow more enduring. Wrath sewn into fabric, taking root in silence as surely as Blake’s tree, its persistence echoing Gary’s resentment, its quiet endurance unsettling in a way different from the bullets that struck Charlie. When they thicken in certain places, when they layer and cluster, they become atmosphere. 

A Union Jack flag on a lamppost.

Union Flags made it onto some streetlights I walk past with my daughter in Newcastle, on the way to the swimming pool. “What do they mean?” she asked. For some, pride. For others, threat. For most, perhaps nothing at all. And then they were torn down, leaving a frayed seam, a dangling strip of tattered cloth still tied to the upright metal. That felt even more ominous. Not simply a sign of division, but of reaction. And do you notice, where they are hung only as high as a ladder will reach, they look almost like flags at half-mast? As if beneath the defiance there lingers a subconscious grief. 

And so the question lingers: what will come of it all? What future is being staked out? Are these new buds on Blake’s poisonous tree? 

Some flags are celebrated, raised over civic buildings as sacraments of a new national creed. 

Other flags are torn down, left to fray on lamp-posts, almost threatening in their persistence. 

Wrath here does not riot or narrow. It takes root. 

This is England, isn’t it? 

 

A benediction: I was angry 

And how might anger, left unheard before it hardens into wrath, speak with the voice of Christ? 

I was angry, and you called me gammon. 
I was angry, and you called me woke. 
I was angry, and you heard only your politics, 
not my pain. 
 
I was angry, and you argued about tribes and sides. 
I was angry, and you measured me as vote, as threat, as cause. 
I was angry, and you did not really listen to me. 
 
Truly I tell you: 
when you saw the angry and called them only left or right, 
you understood nothing. 
You did not know me. 
 
And these will go away still unheard, 
their wrath growing strong in the shadows, waiting to erupt. 
 
But those who bore the anger of the poorly heard, 
who listened without contempt or fear, 
This too is England. I am found there. 

 

This article was first published on John Clifton’s SubStack. It is reproduced by kind permission of the author.

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