structural:expansion, linguistic:voice_change, stylistic:tone
Others

Dan Egonsson, followed by Roger Wertheimer, argued that while it is conventional for people to equate dignity with 'being human' (Egonsson's 'Standard Attitude', Wertheimer's 'Standard Belief'), people generally also import something other than mere humanness to their idea of dignity. Egonsson suggested that an entity must be both human and alive to merit an ascription of dignity, while Wertheimer states "it is not a definitional truth that human beings have human status."

According to Arthur Schopenhauer, dignity is opinion of others about our worth and subjective definition of dignity is our fear from this opinion of others.

Karl Marx 's views on dignity were complex, and debates over the role of dignity in his thought relate to the question of whether Marx's critique of capitalism had a moral dimension. Marx wrote positively about dignity in his early work, and suggested it could underpin his theory of alienation; however he elsewhere rejected the view that humans have a right to dignity, and argued that moral norms could not form the basis of a critique of capitalism because they form part of society's ideological superstructure. The philosopher Somogy Varga argues that Marx's account of dignity forms part of a critique of Kantian ethics as unjusifiably imagining moral values to be transhistorical rather than emerging from historical processes and social practices.

More recently, Philippe-André Rodriguez has argued that human dignity is best understood as an essentially contested concept. As he argues, "it seems that it is this very nature of the concept that has allowed, on the one hand, human rights to receive such international acceptance as a theoretical enterprise and, on the other hand, has led the concept to be constantly challenged by different cultures worldwide."