Religion & Law

I'm always curious to see how scholars articulate (or fail to articulate) what "human dignity" means, especially in non-religious contexts, and to figure out what work the concept is doing for them.  Markus Dubber has posted a short essay on dignity in penal law.  Here's an excerpt:

American penality continues to operate as an exercise of the sovereign?s ?police power,? which regards the objects of governance as human resources within the state household, rather than as persons defined by their capacity for self-government, or autonomy. Dignity, properly defined, is personal?rather than social?dignity, which is owed persons qua persons. Insofar as autonomy is the fundamental principle of legitimacy of a liberal democratic state, in the United States and elsewhere, a system of penal law is only legitimate if it always also regards its objects as legal subjects, i.e., as persons who possess the capacity for autonomy and, therefore, dignity.

Equating dignity with the capacity for autonomy is hardly unusual (at least since Kant), but I'm more interested in the sharp distinction between "personal dignity" and "social dignity."  If Prof. Dubber is definining "social" as "collective," then I see the need for the distinction, but if "social" is equivalent to "relational," then I'm not so sure.  The more I think about human dignity, the less comfortable I am defining it without reference to human relationships, especially in an area such as criminal law.