as particular people and our lives as a society. Human dignity, the unconditional requirement that we attend with reverence to one another, rests firmly on this conviction that the other is already related to something that isn’t me. And without that conviction we are in serious ethical trouble. That’s why some people like to say, as Spaemann does in the book I quoted earlier, that there is a connection between the notion of human dignity and the notion of the sacred—not only the specific ways in