The Decent Society

Everything now depends on what humiliation actually is, and Margalit is careful here. Humiliation, in his definition, is any behavior or condition that gives a person sound reason to consider their self-respect injured. The word sound is doing work. He is not talking about hurt feelings, or the ordinary sensitivity of someone who takes offence too easily. He means treatment that any reasonable person would experience as an attack on their standing as a human being.

The book distinguishes several forms this can take. The most direct is treating a person as though they were not human at all — as a thing, an animal, a mere instance of a category rather than an individual. A subtler form is treating a human being as though they lacked the capacities that make humans distinctive: as if they could not reason, could not choose, could not be trusted with their own life. There is also the humiliation of rejection — being cast out of the human commonwealth, told in effect that one does not belong among persons who count.

Margalit's argument turns sharp when it reaches the welfare state, because this is where a well-meaning society most often humiliates. Helping the poor is a decent aim. But the manner of the help can undo the decency of the aim. A system that relieves need while forcing recipients to prove their unworthiness, to expose their private circumstances, to accept aid as charity dispensed to the pitiable rather than as a right owed to a citizen, humiliates even as it feeds. The gift that must be begged for injures the one who receives it.

This gives him a lever against a certain kind of paternalism. Institutions often justify intrusive, degrading procedures in the name of caring for people — checking, monitoring, deciding on their behalf what they truly need. Margalit's point is that treating adults as incapable of managing their own lives is itself a form of humiliation, however benign the motive. Snooping into someone's life to confirm their poverty says something about their standing, and what it says is corrosive.

Step back, and what Margalit has really done is argue for a different kind of political standard — a floor rather than a ceiling. Most political philosophy reaches upward, describing the ideal arrangement we should aspire to. Margalit reaches downward, marking the line beneath which no society should be allowed to fall. Non-humiliation is not the summit of political achievement. It is the minimum below which a society forfeits the right to call itself decent at all.

There is a deliberate modesty in this, and Margalit knows it can look like settling for too little. Why aim only at not degrading people when we could aim at treating them justly? His answer is that a reachable minimum, actually met, is worth more than a magnificent ideal endlessly deferred. Decency is not a lowering of ambition so much as a refusal to let the perfect excuse the intolerable. A society can be forgiven for not yet being just. It cannot be forgiven for humiliating the people it governs.

Margalit's book has aged into something more pointed than its quiet tone first suggested. Written just as liberal political philosophy was at its most confident about justice, it insisted that the confident question was the second one. The first is whether institutions humiliate — and by that test, plenty of wealthy, formally just societies come up short, degrading the poor, the sick, the jobless, and the stranger through the ordinary operation of systems designed to help them.