The concept of ‘human dignity’ sits at the heart of international human rights law and a growing number of national constitutions and yet its meaning is heavily contested and contingent. I aim to supplement the theoretical literature on dignity by providing an empirical study of how the concept is used in the specific context of legal discourse on sex work. I will analyse jurisprudence in which commercial sex was declared as incompatible with human dignity, focussing on the South African Constitutional (...) Court case of S v Jordan and the Indian Supreme Court case of Budhadev Karmaskar v State of West Bengal. I will consider how these courts conceptualise dignity and argue that their conclusions on the undignified nature of sex work are predicated on particular sexual norms that privilege emotional and relational intimacy. In light of the stigma faced by sex workers I will explore how a discourse, proclaiming sex work as beneath human dignity, may impact on the way that sex workers are perceived and represented culturally, arguing that it reinforces stigma. I will go on to examine how sex workers subvert the notion that commercial sex is undignified, and resist stigma, by campaigning for the right to sell sex with dignity. I will demonstrate that an alternative legal approach to dignity and sex work is possible, where the two are not considered as inherently incompatible, concluding with thoughts on the risks and benefits of using ‘dignity talk’ in activism and campaigns for sex work law reform. (shrink)

The proper role, if any, for religion-based arguments is a live and sometimes heated issue within the field of bioethics. The issue attracts heat primarily because bioethical analyses influence the outcomes of controversial court cases and help shape legislation in sensitive biopolicy areas. A problem for religious bioethicists who seek to influence biopolicy is that there is now widespread academic and public acceptance, at least within liberal democracies, that the state should not base its policies on any particular religion’s metaphysical (...) claims or esoteric moral system. In response, bioethicists motivated by religious concerns have adopted two identifiable strategies. Sometimes they rely on slippery-slope arguments that, sometimes at least, have empirically testable premises. A more questionable response is the manipulation and misuse of secular-sounding moral language, such as references to “human dignity,” and the plights of groups of people labeled “vulnerable.”. (shrink)

The article looks at general problems associated with the explication of the concept of human dignity, then looks specifically at this in relation to bioethics and suggests possible solutions. The author explores the intellectual history of the concept and responds to the radical criticism that the concept of human dignity is useless and redundant in bioethical discourse scientific image of the world). He argues 1) that the ambiguity and relativity of the concept can be solved by precisely identifying the content (...) and performing a classification analysis and shows that the concept does have cognitive content that is irreducible to other concepts; 2) that the need to elaborate the concept of human dignity is pre-Christian in origin and that the idea of a personal God and the Holy Trinity are not prerequisite to the concept; and 3) that the idea of human dignity as otherness could prevent anthropocentric speciesism and the naturalistic abolition of human self-identity. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis report on end‐of‐life decision‐making in Canada was produced by an international expert panel and commissioned by the Royal Society of Canada. It consists of five chapters.Chapter 1 reviews what is known about end‐of‐life care and opinions about assisted dying in Canada.Chapter 2 reviews the legal status quo in Canada with regard to various forms of assisted death.Chapter 3 reviews ethical issues pertaining to assisted death. The analysis is grounded in core values central to Canada's constitutional order.Chapter 4 reviews the (...) experiences had in a number of jurisdictions that have decriminalized or recently reviewed assisted dying in some shape or form.Chapter 5 provides recommendations with regard to the provision of palliative care in Canada, as well as recommendations for reform with respect to the various forms of assisted death covered in this document. (shrink)

The historical making of human dignity is usually understood either as a result of a progressive history of the recognition of the human being’s worthiness or as an upward equalization of ranks. Th...

Why should all human beings have certain rights simply by virtue of being human? One justification is an appeal to religious authority. However, in increasingly secular societies this approach has its limits. An alternative answer is that human rights are justified through human dignity. This paper argues that human rights and human dignity are better separated for three reasons. First, the justification paradox: the concept of human dignity does not solve the justification problem for human rights but rather aggravates it (...) in secular societies. Second, the Kantian cul-de-sac: if human rights were based on Kant’s concept of dignity rather than theist grounds, such rights would lose their universal validity. Third, hazard by association: human dignity is nowadays more controversial than the concept of human rights, especially given unresolved tensions between aspirational dignity and inviolable dignity. In conclusion, proponents of universal human rights will fare better with alternative frameworks to justify human rights rather than relying on the concept of dignity. (shrink)

Background: The concept of dignity can be divided into two main attributes: absolute dignity that calls for recognition of an inner worth of persons and social dignity that can be changeable and can be lost as a result of different social factors and moral behaviours. In this light, the nursing profession has a professional dignity that is to be continually constructed and re-constructed and involves both main attributes of dignity. Objectives: The purpose of this study was to determine how nurses (...) described nursing’s professional dignity in internal medicine and surgery departments in hospital settings. Research design: The research design was qualitative. Ethical considerations: This study was approved by the ethics committees of the healthcare organizations involved. All the participants were provided with information about the purpose and the nature of the study. Participants: A total of 124 nurses participated in this study. Method: The data were collected using 20 focus group sessions in different parts of Italy. The data were analysed by means of a conventional inductive content analysis starting from the information retrieved in order to extract meaning units and sorting the arising phenomena into conceptually meaningful categories and themes. Results: Nursing’s professional dignity was deeply embedded in the innermost part of individuals. Regarding the social part of dignity, a great importance was put on the values that compose nursing’s professional identity, the socio-historical background and the evolution of nursing in the area considered. The social part of dignity was also linked to collaboration with physicians and with healthcare assistants who were thought to have a central role in easing work strain. Equally important, though, was the relationship with peers and senior nurses. Conclusion: The organizational environments under scrutiny with their low staffing levels, overload of work and hierarchical interactions did not promote respect for the dignity of nurses. To understand these professional values, it is pivotal to comprehend the role of different health professions in their cultural milieu and the evolution of the nursing profession in diverse countries. (shrink)

In the age of artificial intelligence, the common interest in human autonomy is experiencing a revival. Autonomy has formerly and mostly been investigated from a theoretical scientific perspective, in which scholars from various disciplines have linked autonomy with the concepts of dignity, independence from others, morality, self-awareness, and unconventionality. In a series of three semi-qualitative, preregistered online studies, we investigated laypersons' understanding of autonomy with a bottom-up procedure to find out how far lay intuition is consistent with scientific theory. First, (...) in Study 1, participants provided us with at least three and up to 10 examples of autonomous behaviors, for a total of 807 meaningful examples. With the help of blinded research assistants, we sorted the obtained examples into categories, from which we generated 34 representative items for the following studies. Next, in Study 2, we asked a new sample of participants to rate the degree of autonomy reflected in each of these 34 items. Last, we presented the five highest-rated and the five lowest-rated items to the participants of Study 3, whom we asked to evaluate how strongly they represented the components of autonomy: dignity, independence from others, morality, self-awareness, and unconventionality. We identified that dignity, independence from others, morality, and self-awareness significantly distinguished between high- and low-autonomy items, implying that high autonomy items were rated higher on dignity, independence from others, morality, and self-awareness than low autonomy items, but unconventionality did not. Our findings contribute to both our understanding of autonomous behaviors and connecting lay intuition with scientific theory. (shrink)

This article focuses on human dignity as a moral idea and, in particular, on a single but fundamental question: what conception of human dignity, if any, can generate an egalitarian duty to respect all persons? After surveying two mainstream and two alternative conceptions, the article suggests that explaining how human dignity generates an egalitarian duty of respect may be more difficult than has been appreciated.

Background: People with progressive cancer experience that their bodies change due to disease and/or treatment. The body is integral to the unity of the human being, a unity that must be perceived as whole if dignity shall be experienced. Relatives are in touch with the suffering bodies of their dear ones, physically, socially, mentally, and existentially, and thus the relatives’ experiences of the bodies of their dear ones might yield insight into the concept of dignity. Aim: The aim of this (...) study is to explore relatives’ experiences of the patients’ bodily changes from a perspective of dignity. Research design and method: A total of 12 relatives from a hospice in Norway were interviewed. Gadamer’s ontological hermeneutics inspired the interpretation. Ethical considerations: The principles of voluntariness, confidentiality, withdrawal, and anonymity were respected during the whole research process. The Norwegian Social Science Data Services approved the study. Results and conclusion: The conversations about the body were conversations about ambivalent or paradoxical matters that shed light on the concept of dignity. The results show that the relatives got in touch with elements that otherwise would have remained tacit and unspoken, and which gave glimpses of a deeper truth, which might reveal the core of dignity. Furthermore, the relatives’ confirmation of the ambivalence might be understood as a strong ethical obligation to treat the other with dignity. The confirmation may also reveal the relatives’ unselfish love of the other, which can be understood as the core of ethics and ethos. Finally, the results reveal the relatives’ limited insight into their dear ones’ bodily changes, and we discuss the challenges of truly seeing the other. Body knowledge and the relationship between body and dignity as phenomena cannot be ignored and needs more attention and articulation in clinical nursing practice and in nursing research. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to bring to social theorists’ attention the growing visibility of the notion of dignity within human rights legislation, bioethics and public discourse generally, as well as to evaluate this term’s potential to enhance our capacities to respond to old and new challenges. The article starts with a short presentation of the career of the concept and discussion of the various impasses and conceptual tensions connected with the notion of human dignity. It is followed by (...) an exploration of how the idea of human dignity has become one of the main achievements of modern times. The question of how respect for human dignity has turned out to be the fundamental feature of democratic society is addressed with help from both Waldron’s perspective on human dignity as the ground of human rights and Habermas’s approach that stresses the moral content of human rights. The final part of the article examines the value of the notion of dignity for social theorizing by looking at ways the employment of the concept may contribute to sociological thought and enquiry. (shrink)

In the first of the three essays of Theory and Practice published in 1793, Kant took the task to answer some objections that Ch. Garve, Kant’s contemporary popular philosopher, had raised against his ethical theory a couple of years earlier. One of these, the most important one in my view, has to do with the problem of, as Garve puts it, “how anyone can become aware of having performed his duty quite unselfishly”. In this paper, my aim is to recover (...) the pertinence of this text by showing two things. First, that this essay is part of a controversy between Garve and Kant that transcends, historically and philosophically, Theory and Practice itself; and second, that Kant fails to succeed in this controversy against Garve due to a confession that he makes during the discussion, for this statement runs against that which has the intend to be demonstrate by the argument of the “fact of pure reason”. (shrink)

Employing moral values as justifications in judicial decisions has been controversial. At present, there is increasing controversy over the application of human dignity. Contemporary debates on the role of dignity in law and adjudication are heavily influenced by Christopher McCrudden’s account of dignity as a placeholder, and much thinking on the contested nature of values is influenced by WB Gallie’s idea of Essentially Contested Concepts. In this paper I argue that both these accounts have limited explanatory and normative potential. McCrudden’s (...) account is illuminating in terms of the role of dignity in the UDHR, but weak in terms of explaining why employing dignity in adjudication yields diverging conclusions, and why dignity should be understood to be a placeholder. His reliance on Gallie’s idea of Essentially Contested Concepts is also misplaced. Gallie’s views often serve as a philosophical basis for understanding the contested nature of values generally. I argue that his account is an external-descriptive one, which cannot explain why persistent disagreement ensues because of the peculiar nature of some concepts. Neither does it point out any property of essential contestability that is unique to some concepts. Thinking on how values such as dignity can figure as justifications for decisions, therefore, must explore other alternatives. (shrink)