Our technological achievements as tool using animals are staggering. Do our relatively powerful intellects compared to virtually all other animals imbue us with a transcendent dignity or are we really just self important monkeys with car keys?
I don’t know about “dignity”, but I do believe that human beings are qualitatively different from and superior to all other life on the planet. We have the only civilizations that have progressed beyond the hunter-gathererer band level of development, we are far and away the most sophisticated tool-users, and our capacity for abstract thought is absolutely unmatched, so far as we know, by any other animal. Most important, we are the only animals capable of formulating complex, long-term plans for the modification of our environment to suit our own needs.
In fact, it is my own feeling that human beings are the closest things to gods our world has ever seen. We move mountains and rivers to suit our needs, we design animals and plants as we see fit - heck, the powers of the atoms themselves are used by us both to improve our lives, and as weapons of war that the gods of any mythology would envy. We communicate instantly across continents, explore from the sea depths to outer space - we kick ass, people. 
We’re truly mind-numbingly powerful and intelligent, when you stop and think about it.
So I say, we’re more than just monkeys. We are the masters of this planet, and everything on it, and we should act accordingly, changing things as we see fit.
that’s my take, at any rate.
It’s all in our heads. Literally.
The concept of dignity really can’t apply to other animals. It’s an anthropomorohic projection to say that an eagle, for example, has any dignity. So, you can’t say that we have a special dignity, but that we are capable of dignity. And we’re also uniquely capable of it’s opposite.
We have only the dignity we create for each other, by honoring that dignity. “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” and all that.
And, of course, as such it is indeed an illusion, it has no tangible facet, cannot be weighed, measured or analyzed. It can be negated arbitrarily, a starving man has no dignity.
It is a gift we bestow upon each other. When we cease to honor that gift dignity will cease to exist. As will we.
Drunk naked man arrested for speeding on a motorized bar stool with his ass on fire.
The best answer I’ve seen to any such philosophical question on thsi board yet, NutWrench. Many thanks.
Dignity for me comes from the fact that we should be afforded personal choice and freedom, so it’s a question of human rights.
So while any human can act the clown under their own will and choosing, for them to be mocked or degraded against their will is a breach of human rights. Likewise people should not be prevented or disabled from keeping themselves healthy, clean and safe.
I actually believe this extends to animals under our care too. They should also be kept healthy, clean and safe and not mocked or taunted.
You’re approaching the subject matter from a different direction than I would. Never mind “dignity”, how are we different from other species?
There are other social creatures, social in the sense that you can’t understand them at all by studying one of them in isolation because such a huge whopping portion of who they are is themselves-in-a-society. But the others that are in that category are insects. Yeah, I know there are other mammals that cluster in schools and herds and tribes, but there’s a difference between a herd and a hive, and homo sap is a hive creature.
Meanwhile…there are other intelligent species, such that as individuals they have impressive brains and are able to learn and understand a wide range of things. Some experiments indicate that they could use language much as we do and once having learned one during the course of the research can carry on fairly complex conversations. But the other species that are in that category are not social-hive creatures as we are. They may have the intelligence to be able to use complex language, but as far as we can tell, in their everyday interactions with other individuals of their species, they have not developed them, and it would appear that their lives as individuals are lives consisting of their own experiences and with the companionship of others of their sort, rather than being Chapter 937 in a long historical tome of thoughts and ideas and concepts, the thing we call “culture”.
So that, I think, is what makes us unique. Our intelligence is leveraged via our social nature and vice versa. Neither dolphins nor ants are going to the moon in vehicles they created out of metals they extracted and smelted from the natural world and controlled through electronics devised as a consequence of understanding electricity and magnetism and resistance. And neither honeybees nor mountain gorillas are sitting down to their computers and connecting to their species’ commercial ISP services so as to access one of their message boards to discuss with others of their ilk whether or not their species has special characteristics setting them apart from the other inhabitants of the earth.