Dignity inheres in them because they are destined to be free to reflect and to choose, and thus to be provident over the course of their own lives, responsible for their own actions. A person is capable of insight, love, and long-term commitment. Such creatures are deserving of respect from other rational creatures. Their inherent nature makes civilization possible, since civilization is constituted by conversation, the art of persuasion through reason, mutual respect. Civilized persons argue respectfully.
Barbarians use clubs.
In other words, the very term person implies a vision of a universal society , which for reasons of practicality and local autonomy, and by the natural workings of culture and history, is organized through countless local associations of varying sizes and horizons. Among these latter, of course, are states but not the most important and not the primary social forms. Even the Soviet Union found it difficult to object to this language entirely, although its representatives did in fact object. Whatever its declared differences, even in the Soviet Union smaller layers of societies, in theory at least, formed the Communist state. In the Declaration are articles about the person and courts, the person and the family, the person and intermediate institutions, the person and religious or cultural traditions, the person and ethnic groups, the person and the state, the person and the international order.