In normative terms, human dignity usually implies two consequences: human beings cannot be treated in some particular ways due to their condition as humans; and some forms of life do not correspond to the ideal life of our community. This study consists in discussing the meaning of this idea of human dignity in contrast to the concept of humiliation in the context of institutional, i.e. political and legal, rights. Two concepts of human dignity will be discussed. The first absolute/necessary and (...) formal/transcendental concept implies the proposition “because human beings have dignity, the following cluster of rights is valid”. Conversely, the second contingent and material concept corresponds to the thought “for being able to live in dignity, we must respect the following rights”. This paper claims that human dignity should be understood as the right to be protected from humiliation. Humiliation is the situation of incapacity or absence of self-determination. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to the academic debate on the general crisis faced by law schools and the legal professions by discussing why juristic practice is a matter of experience rather than knowledge. Through a critical contextualisation of Vilhelm Lundstedt’s thought under processes of globalisation and transnationalism, it is argued that the demise of the jurist’s function is related to law’s scientification as brought about by the metaphysical construction of reality. The suggested roadmap will in turn reveal that the (...) current voiding of juristic practice and its teaching is part of the crisis regarding what makes us human. (shrink)

The paper looks at an impasse with respect to the role of rights as reasons for action which afflicts contemporary legal and political debates. Adopting a meta‐ethical approach, it moves on to argue that the impasse arises from a philosophical confusion surrounding the role of rights as normative reasons. In dispelling the confusion, an account of reasons is put forward that attempts to capture their normativity by relating them to a reflexive public practice. Two key outcomes are identified as a (...) result of this explication: first, that normative practices are instances of rule‐following; and second, that agents partaking of normative practices possess absolute value (i.e., acquire the status of persons). In light of this explication, rights acquire the status of the most general reasons that purport to guarantee the content of personhood by specifying and safeguarding conditions which enable agents to participate in public practices of universalisation. (shrink)

Positivism, in its standard outlook, is normative contextualism: If legal reasons are content-independent, then their content may vary with the context or point of view. Despite several advantages vis-à-vis strong metaphysical conceptions of reasons, contextualism implies relativism, which may lead further to the fragmentation of the point of view of agency. In his Oxford Hart Lecture, Coleman put forward a fresh account of the moral semantics of legal content, one that lays claim to preserving the unity of agency while retaining (...) the social facts thesis, which has been a key intuition of positivism. The present essay identifies potential weaknesses with this account and proposes a reconstruction along rationalist lines: First, it advances a descriptive account of reflective agency that is delivered in terms of a modest conceptual analysis; secondly, this is combined with a context-sensitive or "buck-passing" account of value, which illustrates that substantive reasons for action must be anchored, ontologically speaking, to particular social practices (Social Dependency Thesis). In the end the unity of agency comes at an affordable price, for it is no longer necessary to resort to metaphysical necessity and the most demanding conditions this imposes, in order to defend it. (shrink)