Dignity is often invoked as the basis of human rights. The precise relation between dignity and human rights remains objectionably obscure, however, and many appeals to dignity seem little more than hand-waving, as critics have pointed out. This vagueness is potentially damning for contemporary human rights accounts, as it calls into question whether dignity can truly serve as the foundation of human rights. In order to defend the view that human rights are grounded in human dignity, this paper presents a (...) novel analysis of dignity that elucidates how human rights can be derived from dignity. Arguing that neither contingent nor inherent conceptions of dignity can, on their own, account for human rights, it develops a conceptualisation of dignity that combines inherent and contingent features in a coherent fashion. This, in turn, is shown to provide us with the means to explain how human rights are both grounded in and protective of dignity. Showing that the inherent features of dignity always generate a claim to the contingent features of dignity, the paper demonstrates that human rights derive directly from the inherent features of dignity, whilst what they protect are the contingent features of dignity. The paper closes with a discussion of the advantages of conceptualising dignity in the manner proposed, explicating the connection between dignity and nobility. (shrink)

Legal and political philosophers of a normative bent face an uphill struggle in keeping themes of global justice and cosmopolitan governance, at the forefront of their disciplinary debate, given the perceived urgency of confronting, at the domestic level, the populist upsurge in mature democracies and “democratizing societies” alike. In this paper, these two levels of analysis—national and transnational—mutually enrich one another through a reflection on the ground of legitimacy. In the first section, neo-perfectionist approaches to the legitimation of transnational authority (...) and public reason approaches rooted in the paradigm of “political liberalism” will be contrasted. In the second section, a non-perfectionist and normative conception of the legitimacy of transnational authorities will be derived from Rawls’s “liberal principle of legitimacy” and the difference with the application of the same principle at the domestic level will be elucidated. In the third section, on the basis of such conception, one of the most complete and influential approaches to the legitimacy of transnational authorities—i.e., the “Complex Standard of Legitimacy” expounded by A. Buchanan and R. Keohane in “The Legitimacy of Global Governance Institutions”—will be critically assessed. (shrink)

Half of the working poor in developing countries are informal entrepreneurs – they make a living by engaging in commercial activities in the shadow economy. A series of government and market failur...