Communication in Dignity Since Early Antiquity: From Ptahhotep to Current Ethics and International Law

Abstract

Roots of current conceptions of dignity are identified in Egypt, before the ancient Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian sources usually treated as the earliest notions. They refer to dignity in interactionist terms as freedom of speech and in gender as well as socio-economic class relations. They also treat as duties, virtues, and ideals the opposites of humiliation, defamation, censorship, deception, incitement, hate speech, injustice, greed, lack of connectivity, and invasion of privacy. Transcultural continuity is then demonstrated mainly before or outside of Western culture, which has so far been investigated the most for providing origins of moral and legal dignity.

KEYWORDS:

• Communication ethics
• dignity
• media regulation
• non-western cultures
• ancient Egypt
• Ptahhotep

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.