Human Dignity and Political Criticism

2021 ◽  
pp. 239-266
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Bird

Many, including Marx, Rawls, and the contemporary 'Black Lives Matter' movement, embrace the ambition to secure terms of co-existence in which the worth of people's lives becomes a lived reality rather than an empty boast. This book asks whether, as some believe, the philosophical idea of human dignity can help achieve that ambition. Offering a new fourfold typology of dignity concepts, Colin Bird argues that human dignity can perform this role only if certain traditional ways of conceiving it are abandoned. Accordingly, Bird rejects the idea that human dignity refers to the inherent worth or status of individuals, and instead reinterprets it as a social relation, constituted by affects of respect and the modes of mutual attention which they generate. What emerges is a new vision of human dignity as a vital political value, and an arresting vindication of its role as an agent of critical reflection on politics.


1991 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian L. Wilcox ◽  
Hedwin Nalmark

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (5) ◽  
pp. 264-271
Author(s):  
Rachel E. López

The elderly prison population continues to rise along with higher rates of dementia behind bars. To maintain the detention of this elderly population, federal and state prisons are creating long-term care units, which in turn carry a heavy financial burden. Prisons are thus gearing up to become nursing homes, but without the proper trained staff and adequate financial support. The costs both to taxpayers and to human dignity are only now becoming clear. This article squarely addresses the second dimension of this carceral practice, that is the cost to human dignity. Namely, it sets out why indefinitely incarcerating someone with dementia or other neurocognitive disorders violates the Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. This conclusion derives from the confluence of two lines of U.S. Supreme Court precedent. First, in Madison v. Alabama, the Court recently held that executing someone (in Madison’s case someone with dementia) who cannot rationally understand their sentence amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. Second, in line with Miller v. Alabama, which puts life without parole (LWOP) sentences in the same class as death sentences due to their irrevocability, this holding should be extended to LWOP sentences. Put another way, this article explains why being condemned to life is equivalent to death for someone whose neurodegenerative disease is so severe that they cannot rationally understand their punishment.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 75-92
Author(s):  
Christian Schröer

An act-theoretical view on the profile of responsibility discourse shows in what sense not only all kinds of technical, pragmatic and moral reason, but also all kinds of religious motivation cannot justify a human action sufficiently without acknowledgment to three basic principles of human autonomy as supreme limiting conditions that are human dignity, sense, and justifiability. According to Thomas Aquinas human beings ultimately owe their moral autonomy to a divine creator. So this autonomy can be considered as an expression of secondary-cause autonomy and as the voice of God in the enlightened conscience.


2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-241
Author(s):  
Mirko Pecaric

This paper explores recent notions in public administration, which are intertwined and addressed to the administration of public affairs. On this basis it demonstrates that content of legal system is filled through the static legal principles and rules, but they receive their real content through the informal practices and conditions of the human mind. The paper concludes that discussed notions could have only one name, because they all are the synonyms of reciprocal relation between the human dignity and efficient administration.


2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (4 (1)) ◽  
pp. 39-54
Author(s):  
Robert Grzeszczak

The issue of re-nationalization (disintegration and fragmentation) of integration process is manifested by the will of some of the Member States to verify their relations with the European Union. In the age of an economic crisis of the EU and in relation to the large migration of the population, there has emerged strong social and political criticism, on the European level, of the integration process, with some Member States even consideringtheir withdrawal from the EU. In those States, demands forextending the Member States’ competences in the field of some EU policies are becoming more and more popular. The legal effects of the above-mentioned processes are visible in the free movements of the internal market, mainly within the free movement of persons. Therefore, there are problems, such as increased social dumping process, the need to retain the output of the European labour law, the issue of the so-called social tourism, erosion of the meaning of the EU citizenship and the principle of equal treatment.


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