Human rights are inextricable from the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As the UN Office of the High Commission states, “Human rights are essential to achieving sustainable development that leaves no one behind and are central to all its three dimensions – social, environmental, and economic.” Indeed, if educational outcomes improve through forced conscription, economic growth depends on exploitative labor, or environmental gains are achieved through inequitable treatment, overall flourishing may be diminished rather than increased. Research suggests this is not only possible, but likely: Human rights are loosely defined and monitored, and even firms with explicit human rights commitments fail to act in ways consistent with their statements (Salcito, Wielga and Burton 2015). How can we ensure that our SDG-related work does not erode human rights, and where possible, bolsters them? What concepts can we use to assess organizations’ efforts to advance the SDGs in terms of human rights, such that we can support optimization on these criteria? We answer this question by recognizing that human dignity - the belief that all humans possess inalienable, inherent, unearned and equal value (e.g., Hodson 2001, Lucas et al. 2013, 2015, Wein, Lanthorn and Fischer 2022) is the forerunner and bedrock of human rights. We first align dignity-affirming capabilities (Nussbaum 2012) with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), identifying marketing literatures relevant to each. This alignment makes clear that marketing researchers have informed disparate aspects of dignity and therefore, have already contributed to our understanding of human rights. However, our work stops far short of guidance about translation to practice or generalizable analysis of the experiences that marketers may have the power to shape. To address this gap, we identify recognition, agency and equity as three key components of dignity for which interventions and research can be audited. We briefly report experimental data that suggests that not only can recognition, agency and equity be manipulated at scale, they combine to predict felt dignity. We close with a set of case studies illustrating ways in which these three components of dignity can be audited, such that we can ensure that our research and interventions support the cause of human rights across SDGs
