Chapter 10 questions whether law should widen its lens to address general appearance discrimination too. Would a protected characteristic of appearance offer viable legal rights to the many millions of us who do not have a disfigurement but are less-than-beautiful in some way? For example, is appearance objective enough to be adjudicated in law? Is a clear distinction between mutable and immutable aspects of appearance important – or even possible given increasing medico-cosmetic opportunities to change the way our bodies look? Do we have an unobjectionable nomenclature to describe appearance and attractiveness in legal terms? And could we swallow well-meaning employers’ attempts to measure the attractiveness of their staff for the purposes of diversity monitoring? The discussion draws on examples of comparative laws in France and America. Both countries have adopted wider conceptions of appearance equality, and America’s laws have seen a recent period of growth, with Binghampton, New York, the latest to vote such a law onto its statute books in 2023. However, both sets of laws remain little used so far, despite evidence showing that appearance discrimination remains prevalent. How could we ensure that a protected characteristic of appearance in the UK avoided a similar fate?

Chapter 2 explores an important premise which underlies this critique of the law: it examines the idea that disfigurement inequality is a problem which merits a legal response – namely the granting of protective rights under the Act. It concludes that, despite some uncomfortable distinctions, there is a compelling case for a legal response in this area. The nature of law’s current response is then laid out. Relevant parts of the international legal framework – including EU law, the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (‘CRPD’) and decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (‘ECtHR’) applying the European Convention on Human Rights – are explained by reference to the models of disability which implicitly inform them.

How much of a role can human dignity play in constitutional law? It can certainly serve as a foundation of some or all of the rights that a constitution comprises, and it may also figure in the specific content of some of these rights. It may do this explicitly or implicitly – implicitly (as in the US Constitution) when dignity’s role is brought out in legal argument rather than the explicit text. Most rights that protect freedom implicate dignity, but so also do social and economic rights in the constitutions that have them. More generally human dignity may serve as a constitutional value, guiding the interpretation of other provisions: it does this, for example, explicitly in the Constitution of South Africa. It may also underpin the constitutional protection of democracy and the franchise, the rule of law, structures of accountability, the importance of citizenship, and the overall orientation of the provisions of the constitution towards respect for the ordinary people of the country that it governs.

The witholding of equal public recognition of national, cultural and language identity often causes severe anguish to sub-state peoples and sometimes leads to war. For this reason, political philosophy has an important responsibility to think through the moral grounds and the appropriate means of recognition. This chapter draws a moral map of the recognitional debate, outlining three normative camps: nonrecognition, monorecognition, and recognitional pluralism. I argue for recognitional pluralism, in two steps. The first step establishes, contra nonrecognition, that nations, cultures and languages are recognition-worthy, and that this is so for two reasons: they give people access to cultural life-worlds, and they are sources of dignity. The second step builds the case for a pluralistic means of according public recognition. To do so, I argue, against monorecognition, that egalitarian recognition of life-world access and dignity is to be the driving principle. Within the pluralist camp, I argue for the principle of equal services, which implies that the state accords comparable cultural services to the cultural groups that share a state or territory. Examples of this can be found in equal language rights regimes, egalitarian public holiday systems, as well as in multinational federalism.

Since manipulation is a relation involving power over another, it is alleged that it necessarily manifests disrespect toward persons. The analysis in the chapter explores this claim and rejects it. The following broad arguments are advanced: (1) The essence of manipulation is treating others as if they are machines (mechanification); it is therefore natural to examine whether manipulation manifests the same disrespect involved in objectification. The analysis rejects this possibility. (2) The dichotomy between “respectful influence through rational persuasion” and “disrespectful influence via (soft) power” is deconstructed. It is important to treat others “as rational,” but this can involve various elements of soft power, and thus manipulation need not be disrespectful. (3) Even “treating as rational” is not necessary for respect – there are other modes of interaction and influence which manipulations can exhibit that are not disrespectful. Play is analyzed in this regard. (4) Manipulation is often essential for promoting respect for persons through politeness and shielding privacy. The chapter ends by considering the virtuous person as regards the use of manipulation.

Liberty of thought is the first liberty that the Preamble to the Constitution of India aims to secure. Yet, one finds no mention of ‘thought’ as one of the protected freedoms under Part III of the Constitution, which safeguards fundamental rights. This chapter takes the first steps to address this riddle and locating the normative foundations for the right. It argues that while the Preambular ideal itself is insufficient to confer a substantive right, its role in judicial interpretation, along with the interrelationship between fundamental rights, provides a robust normative foundation for the right to freedom of thought in India. Specifically, the chapter discusses the development of the right to mental privacy in the context of brain-reading in Selvi, and later in Puttaswamy. The right to (mental) privacy read into dignity by the Supreme Court of India already takes steps towards constructing a forum internum, and on the other hand, the challenge of the vulnerability of the legal subject becomes evident in the context of the right to freedom of conscience. Regarding the absolute nature of the right, this chapter argues that only as a Preambular ideal is the liberty of thought absolute within the Indian legal framework.

This chapter rehearses the standard intellectual history of dignity, which begins in antiquity, then moves to the Italian Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola and the eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant, and eventually reaches the twentieth-century development of dignity as a concept that has a prominent place in national constitutions and international human rights law and in the interpretative texts and legal commentaries thereon. In a final section, the chapter revisits Kant, concluding with the thought that it might not be possible to uproot the ideology of race which Kant helped to legitimate without tracing its connections to his ideas about human dignity.

This is the first of three chapters which present ‘mini-studies’ of dignity. If, as the book argues, abstract discussion of dignity elides much of what we need to know about the concept, these mini-studies are designed to illustrate how a more contextualised treatment can take us further. Each of the mini-studies is concerned with dignity at a particular time, in a particular place, and with reference to a particular object. In the case of this chapter, the object is a series of photographs taken of Trucanini, a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman once (erroneously) said to be the ‘last of her race’. The chapter explores dignity at the intersection of colonial photography and Victorian race science.

In this chapter, the second of the book’s mini-studies of dignity, we turn to early twentieth-century India. Here the object is cloth, and the focus is on Gandhi’s campaign for the manufacture and use of homespun cloth (khadi). The language of dignity was a striking feature of that campaign; Gandhi appealed to Indians to ‘realise their dignity’ by discarding their foreign cloth and renewing their home textile industry. Yet while he made that appeal, the great Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar insisted that dignity could not be achieved for all Indians without social transformation, including the dismantling of the Hindu system of caste.

This is the third and final of the book’s mini-studies of dignity. Jumping forward in time again to twenty-first-century South Africa, this chapter revolves around an object that bears on an important aspect of what many people today understand by dignity: the toilet. As one campaigning slogan has it, ‘sanitation is dignity’. South Africa is a country in which there exist large disparities in the distribution of sanitation services, with black South Africans considerably less well served than white South Africans. The chapter follows the efforts of poor black communities to secure or defend sanitary dignity through litigation and public protest.

This chapter provides an introduction to the book’s subject matter and an initial sense of its ‘worldly’ orientation and themes. Some common spheres in which dignity is important are surveyed (end-of-life arrangements and funerals, access to sanitation and hygiene products, practices of health and social care, relations in the workplace, etc.), leading to the postulation of three general points: dignity is performative, embodied and ineliminably relational; dignity is emergent – a process, and not simply a quality, attribute or state of being; dignity is political, in that it is enmeshed with the wider conditions affecting economy, society and culture.

This chapter presents the book’s conclusions. Drawing together the threads of the three mini-studies, the chapter puts forward an account of human dignity that calls into question the conventional distinction between ‘status dignity’ and ‘intrinsic dignity’, and highlights the status-based character of dignity, viewed from the standpoint of less privileged people. Regarding the book’s title, it is recalled that this is a reference to the stare often commented upon by viewers of one of the photographs discussed in Chapter 3. Trucanini’s stare may be taken to suggest both the enigma of dignity and the dignity that stems from the ultimate inaccessibility to others of private experience and thoughts.