Dignity Subtraction: Re-centering Ethics in a World That Makes Some Lives Count Less

Editors' note: This essay is part of the 2026 Global Ethics Day online exclusive roundtable from Ethics & International Affairs. View the whole collection here.

Dignity Subtraction: Re-centering Ethics in a World That Makes Some Lives Count Less

One of the most consequential concerns for ethical inquiry is how societies recognize and protect the equal dignity of every person. Global Ethics Day calls on institutions to place ethics at the center of their operations. Taking that commitment seriously requires confronting a less obvious process that shapes contemporary global governance. I call this process dignity subtraction: the cumulative social and institutional process through which people who legally and morally possess equal human dignity are accorded less moral value, institutional protection, credibility, and redress. Dignity remains formally universal, but its recognition and institutional protection are unevenly distributed. Some groups are treated as fully deserving of protection, while others are seen as less credible, less worthy of concern, or more susceptible to systemic harms. Consequently, societies that publicly affirm universal human rights can still end up normalizing violence, neglect, or exclusion against certain populations while responding swiftly and forcefully when others are affected.

Dignity subtraction often takes shape through routine administrative decisions, which can appear neutral even as they distribute protection unevenly. A welfare claimant may be treated as a fraud risk, a poor and racialized migrant as “irregular,” or a neighborhood as dangerous, and once those classifications enter official government and public discourses, those classifications can influence who is monitored closely, who must repeatedly justify their claims, and whose complaints are treated as urgent. As these decisions accumulate across state agencies and institutions, unequal treatment can become normalized, leaving some groups with better access to protection and redress while others face greater scrutiny, delay, neglect, or coercion.

Global inequality functions as the structural backdrop. In 2025, billionaire wealth rose by more than 16 percent to $18.3 trillion.¹ Such concentration matters because wealth buys insulation from many forms of insecurity: legal counsel, mobility, political access, and the capacity to absorb sudden losses. Those without these buffers are more exposed to eviction, hunger, unsafe work, coercive policing, and prolonged legal vulnerability. The global war on drugs, for example, operates within this unequal terrain, with its harshest consequences concentrated among communities already facing economic precarity and weak political protection.

In this essay I will first expand on the mechanics of dignity subtraction and then illustrate how it functions through two cases studies: the war on drugs in the Philippines and the “false positives” scandal in Colombia. I then propose a “dignity audit” for institutional-level policy building that would encourage a re-centering of ethics with a focus on the worth and dignity of every individual.

The Mechanics of Dignity Subtraction

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins with the recognition that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.² That premise places human worth beyond gender, race, nationality, class, usefulness, or public approval. Its force becomes clearest when protection is politically inconvenient.

My earlier research on crisis-driven dehumanization identifies four connected processes that lead to this degradation: threat construction, expanded state coercion, the reinforcement of social hierarchies, and the normalization of preventable deaths.³ Dignity subtraction captures a broader and often less visible process than dehumanization. People need not be portrayed as less than human before their claims begin to lose political weight; they may remain formally recognized as rights-bearing persons while being treated as increasingly undeserving, suspect, or expendable. Consider an overcrowded emergency system in which two patients have the same legal right to healthcare, yet one receives faster attention because she has immense wealth, powerful social connections, or social credibility while the other is left waiting because he is poor, stigmatized as negligent, or presumed irresponsible. Dehumanization can mark an extreme point in this process, but dignity subtraction often begins earlier, when unequal power quietly changes whose suffering commands urgency, restraint, or accountability.

Dignity subtraction is cumulative: social and institutional judgments can progressively reduce the protection, credibility, sympathy, and redress extended to particular people or groups. Poverty, racialization, citizenship status, alleged criminality, and designation as a security threat may each weaken the practical recognition of a dignity that formally remains equal. Intersectionality explains how race, gender, class, citizenship, and other hierarchies combine in distinctive ways that structure unequal vulnerability.⁴ Dignity subtraction follows, consequently asking how institutions translate that unequal position into different levels of credibility, urgency, care, protection, and redress. A poor migrant woman may occupy several intersecting disadvantages, but dignity subtraction becomes visible when those disadvantages shape how officials assess her testimony, how quickly institutions respond to her injury, or whether her suffering is treated as exceptional or routine. The distinction is therefore both analytical and ethical: intersectionality maps how power is organized across overlapping social positions, while dignity subtraction identifies the institutional process through which those positions are converted into unequal moral weight. Once that conversion occurs, social hierarchy begins to determine whose claims command action and whose can be delayed, discounted, or ignored.

Political language can lower the threshold for unequal treatment long before coercion begins. The label of “queue jumper” suggests that a migrant has unfairly bypassed others who waited their turn; that of “benefit cheat” recasts a welfare claimant as someone exploiting public generosity; “super-predator” portrays a young offender as exceptionally violent, remorseless, and beyond rehabilitation. Once such labels enter public debate and administrative practice, they do more than describe behavior. They shape sentencing, eligibility rules, policing priorities, and public judgments about who deserves assistance or restraint. A category thus becomes a shortcut for moral evaluation, narrowing the range of responses considered legitimate while making the person behind it easier to discount.

Socioeconomic inequality constitutes a distinct pathway of dignity subtraction. Poverty is frequently moralized as evidence of individual irresponsibility, dependency, or personal failure, consequently weakening the perceived claims of poorer people to their moral claim for dignity that could be converted to state protection, social welfare, and public concern.⁵ Class also shapes how institutions interpret failure and wrongdoing. A wealthy entrepreneur whose company collapses may be described as a risk-taker entitled to restructuring and a second chance, while a low-income debtor who misses rent or loan payments can quickly face eviction, penalties, or exclusion from credit. Drug prosecution reveals the same divide: an affluent defendant arrested for possession may secure experienced counsel, treatment-based diversion, or a negotiated outcome, whereas a poor defendant can spend weeks in pretrial detention, accept a plea under financial pressure, and carry a criminal record that closes off work and housing. Similar asymmetries appear in taxation, where aggressive avoidance by powerful actors may be treated as sophisticated planning while minor benefit overpayments trigger fraud investigations. Dignity subtraction appears when wealth buys leniency, legal options, and second chances, while poverty turns similar conduct into detention, debt, social exclusion, and a lasting criminal record.

Similar hierarchies operate at the level of entire populations. Palestinians in Gaza are frequently interpreted through security narratives that can obscure civilian suffering, while dehumanizing representations can further weaken recognition of their equal moral worth.⁶ Uyghur communities in Xinjiang have similarly been constructed as security threats within a counterterrorism framework and subjected to mass detention, surveillance, and coercive assimilation.⁷ Across very different political contexts, institutions possess considerable power to determine whose pain commands attention and whose suffering becomes easier to rationalize.

Dignity Subtraction in Practice

When a Label Replaces a Life: The Philippines

The Philippine war on drugs made dignity subtraction publicly visible in a concrete way. Thousands of people, overwhelmingly from poor communities, were killed during police operations or by unidentified gunmen. Bodies appeared in streets and alleyways, sometimes accompanied by signs identifying the dead as drug users or dealers. A United Nations investigation documented widespread killings, arbitrary detention, persistent impunity, and the vilification of political dissent.⁸ Such signs did more than allege wrongdoing: they attempted to instruct the public how to interpret the dead.

In Manila in 2016, Jennelyn Olayres knelt beside her partner, Michael Siaron, after unidentified gunmen shot him in the street.⁹ A handwritten sign beside his body identified him as a “pusher.” Under Rodrigo Duterte’s violent war on drugs, that word carried a wider moral accusation, as it framed an alleged drug dealer as criminal, dangerous, and undeserving of sympathy, allowing an unproven accusation to substitute for legal judgment. The label “pusher” compressed a complex human life into a stigmatized category, inviting observers to interpret the killing as deserved instead of as an act requiring investigation and accountability.

Siaron’s death illustrates how dignity subtraction accumulates. Poverty had already placed him within a population with limited access to legal protection, political influence, and public credibility. The accusation attached to his body imposed another judgment. Duterte’s broader rhetoric surrounding the drug war further portrayed suspected drug users and dealers as fundamental threats to social order. Socioeconomic marginality, criminal accusation, and political dehumanization could therefore reinforce one another, consequently undermining the presumption that the victim remained entitled to sympathy, due process, and protection. His family confronted the loss of a loved one while also having to resist the public identity imposed upon him.

This state-led violence on civilians developed within a broader politics of militarized punishment. Policing adopted the language, tactics, and moral boundaries of warfare. Drug dependence became associated with personal corruption, while poor neighborhoods became spaces of suspicion. Lethal force performed political resolve, even as poverty, inadequate health care, social exclusion, and the conditions sustaining harmful drug use received far less attention.¹⁰ Repeated state-led killings can continue when victims are routinely framed as criminals, investigations and due process stall, and their deaths stop carrying political costs. Once state officials, media, and citizens begin to treat the dead as people who “had it coming,” demands for inquiry weaken and impunity becomes easier to reproduce. Dignity subtraction turns repeated abuse into something politically tolerable.

The Illusion of Success: Colombia

Colombia’s “false positives” scandal shows how institutional incentives can embed dignity subtraction within organizational practice. Between 2002 and 2008, members of the Colombian military killed civilians and falsely presented them as insurgents who had died in combat. Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace has identified at least 6,402 people who were unlawfully killed and presented as combat deaths during this period.¹¹ Military units faced intense pressure to demonstrate progress against armed organizations, and reported enemy casualties became an important measure of operational effectiveness.

Some victims were recruited through deception. Civilian intermediaries working with members of the military approached young men from impoverished communities with offers of temporary employment. The victims were transported elsewhere, killed, and subsequently presented as members of armed groups killed in combat. Many came from precarious social circumstances in which access to lawyers, journalists, political officials, and other influential networks was already limited.

Dignity subtraction is clearly at work in the “false positives” killings. Poverty made the victims easier to target, and the false label of “enemy combatant” then turned their deaths into institutional achievements.

Responsibility for these crimes rests with the Colombian military actors who organized, perpetrated, concealed, or enabled them. The institutional environment in which the abuses developed nevertheless extended beyond Colombia. Through Plan Colombia, the United States supplied extensive funding, equipment, intelligence, training, and political support to Colombian security institutions. Counternarcotics and counterinsurgency priorities strengthened a militarized security apparatus in which reported body counts could function as evidence of operational effectiveness even as grave abuses against civilians persisted.¹²

Foreign assistance therefore enters the ethical analysis through the political relationships and institutional capacities it helps sustain. Aid can expand health care, social protection, and accountable government, but it can also strengthen coercive institutions and provide political resources and financial incentives to strategically valuable governments facing allegations of abuse.¹³ Ethical responsibility also reaches the governments that finance and equip abusive security institutions. As such, donors must ask where their money goes, which practices their training and incentives reward, as well as whether warnings of abuse trigger suspension or investigation, and whether victims have any realistic path to justice.

Re-centering Ethics through a Dignity Audit

Re-centering ethics requires institutional change. A dignity audit offers one practical starting point by examining how policies distribute danger, recognition, protection, and accountability. Human rights due diligence frameworks already require relevant institutions and public actors to identify actual and potential human rights impacts, prevent or mitigate harm, track responses, and provide or cooperate in remediation.¹⁴ A dignity audit probes a prior layer of institutional judgment: which assumptions about worth, deservingness, danger, and credibility determine which harms become visible and politically consequential in the first place? It scrutinizes the labels, performance measures, administrative routines, and distributions of political voice through which universal protections become unequal in practice.

A dignity audit should give affected people a formal role before policies are locked in. Residents facing intensive policing, migrants subject to new detention rules, or communities exposed to environmental hazards should be able to inspect the evidence, challenge official labels, and trigger independent review when risks are ignored. Without these safeguards, officials may simply reproduce the assumptions the audit is meant to uncover, while participation becomes little more than procedural consent.

Before adopting, financing, or renewing a public policy, decision-makers should ask:

• Who bears its gravest risks, and which groups possess the least capacity to avoid or contest them?
• Which labels, assumptions, and measures of success shape how affected people are perceived?
• Whose knowledge and testimony carry authority when harms are identified, and can those most exposed challenge official evidence before irreversible harm occurs?
• Where has responsibility been dispersed across agencies, governments, contractors, donors, or borders?
• Would the same risks, evidentiary standards, and coercive measures remain politically acceptable if their burdens fell upon socially and politically powerful groups?

These questions should inform budgets, procurement, training, performance indicators, and oversight. Police agencies should abandon measures of success that reward arrests or lethal outcomes without regard to human rights and community welfare. Donor governments should condition security assistance on independent monitoring, transparent investigations, meaningful participation by affected communities, and accessible mechanisms for redress. Drug policy should direct resources toward health care, harm reduction, rehabilitation, social protection, and accountable law enforcement.

A dignity audit cannot resolve every tension involving security, justice, and rights. It can, however, expose moral hierarchies embedded within procedures that appear neutral. Institutions reveal their ethics through the dangers they distribute, the suffering they disregard, the voices they recognize, and the people to whom they remain accountable.

Restoring Moral Weight

The families of Colombia’s victims understood these stakes long before public institutions acknowledged them. Their struggle sought more than corrected military records. They fought to recover names, histories, and relationships from a system that had converted their sons into fraudulent victories. In Manila, Jennelyn Olayres’s grief carried the same insistence. By holding Michael Siaron’s body, she resisted the cardboard label that sought to define his life and settle the meaning of his death. Her act restored human presence where political violence had imposed an accusation.

Re-centering ethics begins with restoring moral weight to those whom institutions reduce to threats, targets, burdens, or statistics. Every person retains an equal claim to dignity. The decisive test arrives when honoring that claim imposes political costs. Dignity subtraction also appears in everyday government decisions that rarely present themselves as moral choices. It can be seen in which neighborhoods receive protection from pollution and which are left with unsafe air or water. It shapes whose losses receive urgent attention after climate disasters and whose are absorbed as expected damage. It appears in whose illnesses attract research funding and timely treatment, whose displacement prompts rapid assistance, and whose deprivation becomes administratively routine.

These patterns are rarely described as judgments about who matters more. Over time, however, they reveal which lives institutions treat as fully worthy of protection and which forms of suffering they have learned to absorb. Resource allocation, climate adaptation, health provision, migration policy, and social protection can all reproduce moral hierarchies without spectacular violence. Some suffering triggers intervention. Other suffering becomes familiar enough to disappear into the background. The true measure of an ethical political order is whether it protects the dignity of those whom power finds easiest to discard.

—Salvador Santino Regilme

Salvador Santino Regilme is Associate Professor of International Relations at Leiden University. His research examines how global power shapes and diminishes human dignity across contestations in rights, global security, foreign aid, political violence, authoritarianism, AI colonialism, oligarchy, citizenship, and the global war on drugs.