Dignity found its way into English through French from Latin before the Renaissance. At that time, dignity was a quality akin to nobility, majesty, and wonderfulness, and philosophers granted dignity to assorted ideas and to various beings. In the 1700s, Immanuel Kant said dignity was being granted to too many ideas and beings. He insisted that a human was the only being, and the human capacity for morality was the only idea, that had dignity.

In the twentieth century, dignity appeared in assorted writings (including international proclamations and conventions) as a reason for peacemaking and for promoting human rights. Academics discovered that many people believed dignity was a synonym for humanness. The academics discovered that, for many people, being human means having dignity, and having dignity means being entitled to respect and to human rights. The academics further discovered, however, that people had tacit qualifications attached to their idea of a human being. Because of these qualifications, many people do not grant humanness to every other person. According to the academics, many people hold the view that only some people have dignity, and only some people deserve respect and rights.

Aldergrove and others say that using dignity to justify calls for respect and for rights is illogical. Aldergrove says dignity (as humanness) is no different from other abstractions, for instance, preciousness or "just because". McDougal et al point out that dignity can be used to justify one set of rights, and to justify another set of rights that nullify the first set.

Aldergrove notes that some people use dignity to mean something other than humanness. Aldergrove observes that, when dignity has a meaning other than "humanness," dignity does not become a more logical reason for rights. The difficulty, says Aldergrove, is that no meaning of dignity can overcome the is-ought problem that David Hume identified.

In the twentieth century and thereafter, few people objected to using dignity as a reason for rights. Consequently, dignity became a concern for legislators, jurists, lawyers, human rights defenders, physicians, medical researchers, and ethicists.