Human Rights, Human Dignity,and Human Experience

The contested understandings of human dignity today make it very problematic as a reliable principle for determining the scope and merit of particular claims of human rights (at least beyond the principle’s narrow, universally agreed-upon core meaning). Merely relying on an overlapping consensus is insufficient. Nevertheless, the beginnings of a broader shared understanding of the meaning and implications of human dignity, as a foundational principle of human rights law, can emerge from our concrete experience. As a common point of reference for critically evaluating and integrating the diversity of instantiations of human rights in differing legal traditions, the elementary experience of human dignity leads us to regard law as a vehicle for sustained and reasoned reflection on the value of human persons and on the scope of our obligations to respect and protect them.

The Dignity of Marriage

Contemporary Catholic magisterial documents frequently use of the word ‘dignity’ to describe the institution of marriage. In this chapter, I argue that the language of dignity is meant and should be taken here quite seriously; ‘dignity’ is predicated of marriage by analogy with its predication of persons, but not merely by a metaphorical extension. We are meant to understand some quite specific points about marriage by the language of dignity, as to its nature, its origins, its end, and its role in ethical and political life.

Dignity and Disgrace: Moral Citizenship and Constitutional Protection

Apartheid’s race discrimination branded blacks inferior, leaving a residue of indignity that was perceived and experienced as shameful. This explains the pivotal significance of dignity in the South African Constitution. Hence the Constitutional Court has created a normative framework for South Africans to assert personhood without the shameful stigmata of past subordination. The Court’s strong protection of sexual orientation is best understood against this backdrop. While there is no ready comparison between race and sexual orientation discrimination, both brand those they subordinate as inferior and thus as the objects of shame. The Court’s jurisprudence on gays and lesbians has, therefore, afforded equality, but also addressed the shameful subordination of the past by enabling gays and lesbians to assert themselves as equal moral citizens who can fulfil their capacities as humans without shame.

From Imago Dei to Mutual Recognition: The Evolution of the Concept of Human Dignity in the Light of the Defence of Religious Freedom

Within the Western tradition the concept of human dignity is related to the idea of human beings as ‘imagines Dei’. Yet this connection does not guarantee any suitable basis for the principle of the defence of religious freedom. Therefore, modern rationalism developed an alternative proposal, centred on the notion of religious tolerance. This approach, however, proves to be as inadequate as the belief-based vision in order to provide for a convincing foundation of a concept of religious freedom understood not only as a ‘negative freedom’ but as an essential element of the self-realization of humans. To overcome the deficits of both approaches, a third understanding is explored in which the experience of faith is recognized as an essential enrichment of social life and ‘tolerance’ is substituted by ‘mutual recognition’, paving the way to a positive acknowledgement of difference.

The Vanishing Absolute and the Deconsecrated God: A Theological Reflection on Revelation, Law, and Human Dignity

Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s idea of homo sacer and on the Catholic natural law tradition, Beattie explores the paradoxes and tensions inherent in the Christian understanding of divine justice and human laws. While natural law resists the pessimism of some Protestant theologies and their secularized postmodern derivatives, the doctrine of original sin means that all human laws are flawed in their quest to maintain justice through the imposition of order. Beattie argues that Christ is homo sacer in whom God is profaned, the human is made sacred, and the crucified body of the dehumanized other on the cross becomes the bearer of an absolute dignity outside the law.

Dignity Rather than Rights

This chapter argues that the yoking together of ‘dignity’ and ‘rights’ is unstable, reflecting the ongoing incompatibility of respectively the liberal and the Catholic traditions of human rights. Both traditions adopt an ‘internal’ and ‘external’ understanding of dignity. The liberal tradition aporetically focuses on subjective right and on circumstances of convenience or pleasure. The Catholic tradition reconciled the ancient but uneasy melding of ‘dignity’ as ‘internal’ reserve and as ‘external’ work or social exchange through reference to persona—the adoption of a role in relationship to God. This discourse of ‘dignity’ is perpetuated in Catholic social teaching. The chapter finally suggests the Catholic tradition must continue, through its blend of corporatism and personalism, to emphasize both hierarchy and social role, contrary to the liberal tradition, as central to the dignity of persons.

Human Dignity: Experience and History, Practical Reason and Faith

This chapter argues that human dignity can be grounded in historical experiences of the violation and attainment of dignity, and through arguments based on practical (as opposed to theoretical) reason about how to advance respect for dignity and reduce its violation. It also presents theological warrants for human dignity based on Christian faith, and argues that reflection by practical reason on human experience interacts with these Christian religious beliefs in ways that have led the Catholic community to become an important advocate of human dignity in recent decades. Continued interaction of practical reason, human experience, and faith can enable the Catholic Church to work with other communities on behalf of human dignity in addressing new challenges today, perhaps leading the church to further historical development of its understanding of human dignity and rights in new technological and social contexts.

Constructing the Meaning of Human Dignity: Four Questions

This chapter argues that human dignity has a number of established and significant legal meanings and considers how the concept has been constructed. Using the provisions on human dignity enshrined in the European Charter of Fundamental Rights as an example of a recent legal formulation of human dignity in Europe, the chapter considers four key questions, namely what human dignity is, who makes human dignity, when human dignity emerged as a legal concept and why human dignity has been used as a legal concept. It is argued that understanding human dignity involves considering a range of possible answers to these questions. Methodological awareness of this plurality of narratives and narrators gives dignity its dynamism and usefulness as a legal concept.

Würde des Menschen: Restoring Human Dignity in Post-Nazi Germany

Historical considerations have so far played a rather subordinate role in the interpretation of Article 1 German Basic Law. This is unfortunate, because the records of the proceedings of the Parliamentary Council show clearly that the famous dictum on Würde des Menschen as a ‘non-interpreted thesis’ (Theodor Heuss) was neither meant to be a carte blanche for any arbitrary interpretation nor an evidence for the impossibility of all kinds of interpretation. The ‘mothers and fathers of the Basic Law’ discussed the meaning of the legal term Würde des Menschen intensely. They agreed that it was neither a more or less vague value assignment nor just the sum of the following basic rights but a real capacity of human beings that had been proven highly vulnerable during the Nazi regime: the inner freedom of man.

A Christian Theological Account of Human Worth

This chapter argues that biblical revelation served as the most important source, at least in European civilization, for the still critically important moral claim that each human life carries profound worth, and the related moral-legal demand that each human being’s dignity must be respected. In Christian theo-ethical terms, this means that the real issue is ‘the God-declared sacredness of each human life with correlated moral obligations’ rather than merely ‘human dignity’. The chapter enters into the biblical materials to present in their own distinctive ways central elements that gave birth to a sacredness-of-life norm and continue to fund that norm today. I reserve a few comments at the end of the chapter to discuss how and why ‘sacredness of human life’ became ‘human dignity’, and what was lost (and perhaps gained) when that transition occurred in the modern period.