Better Means: Dignity, First

In the world of coffee, we have learned to think of dignity as an add-on, sometimes even as a side effect. As if it were something granted — for merit, for high margins, for the ability to generate profit.

Let us notice the order we have grown accustomed to: first product quality, then price, then scale, then narrative. And somewhere at the end — if at all — the human being. Their body, their fatigue, their time, their voice. Dignity becomes something that might happen if the system functions well enough. If the market allows it. If the margin agrees.

This reversal of order is one of the quietest, and at the same time most destructive, errors of contemporary work with coffee.

The greatest harm is taking away a person’s ability to be heard — this is precisely how dignity is violated. Depriving people of the right to speak is neither a lack of politeness nor a side effect of work organization. It is an act of dehumanization.

Every person possesses inviolable dignity grounded in justice, which even the good of society as a whole may not violate. Dignity does not consist in being protected, but in being recognized as capable of action — individually or together with others — solely on the basis of personal consent.

The Better Coffee Standard describes dignity as the conditions in which life can unfold: safety, agency, and the recognition of personhood in work, relationships, and everyday decisions. Dignity exists where a person has a voice, time, and space to participate in the world and to co-create their life with others.

At this point, questions arise that cannot be avoided:
does today’s coffee market allow dignity to be preserved?
when you work with coffee, do you feel that your agency remains intact?
and if not — where and in what way has it been constrained?

Working with coffee very often violates dignity, even when it does not do so visibly. Respect at work means being treated as someone who has something to contribute. Meanwhile, we are treated as those who are meant to build profit — someone else’s, not our own.

You know this: you enter a roastery’s website and read a product description. There is a family history going back several generations, photos of smiling people at work, sometimes children wearing clothes from a “Western” circulation. A question appears that is rarely asked: does the coffee producer have a real right to refuse the sale of these stories and images together with green coffee? And if such a refusal is possible, should the price of the coffee not be lower? It is precisely in such everyday situations that violations of dignity and the right to refuse begin.

The philosophy of profit stands, in its very essence, in opposition to dignity. When market mechanisms become the sole point of reference for the fate of people and their environment, social relations are subordinated to a logic that takes neither limits nor consequences into account.

This is not a matter of ill will. Neutrality under such conditions is not possible. Even with the best intentions, one can participate in violating another person’s dignity — precisely because it happens through systemic facades rather than individual decisions.

It is easy to believe that protecting one’s own dignity is easier than protecting the dignity of others. Life within a system that does not treat dignity as an equal value favors the normalization of its violation. Over time, we stop noticing it — including in our own experience.

That is why, in The Better Coffee, dignity functions alongside the other values as a real point of reference for relationships among coffee people. Not as a declaration, but as a criterion for action. Dignity is operational here: it co-creates structures and everyday interactions among subjects, not objects circulating within coffee and knowledge about it.

The absence of recognition wounds a person’s identity. And because the current circulation of coffee-related products rarely provides such recognition, the lack of dignity most often does not disappear — it is covered over by a facade.