Over the last 60 years the idea of human dignity has become increasingly prominent in the political discourse on human rights. In United Nations documents, for instance, human dignity is currently presented as the justification for human rights. In this paper I shall argue that the contemporary way in which human dignity is thought to ground human rights is very different from the way human dignity has been understood traditionally. My aim is to contrast the contemporary paradigm of dignity to (...) a different one that has been prominent historically from Cicero onwards. My conclusion is that if one wants to use the contemporary conception of dignity, one cannot refer to the history of philosophy for support of this conception, and if one wants to use this history in support, one would have to employ a different conception of dignity that uses a different pattern of thought. (shrink)

edited by Tuija Takala and Matti Häyry, welcomes contributions on the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of bioethics.

In this review of Leon Kass’s Life, liberty and the defense of dignity and Deryck Beyleveld and Roger Brownsword’s Human dignity in bioethics and biolaw. I consider the prospects for a theory of dignity as a basis for bioethics research. I argue that dignity theories are worth exploring in more detail, but that research needs to consider both “antitheory” accounts of the language of bioethics, and to give more weight to accounts of dignity as an outcome of holding positive liberties (...) and as something that has a psychological dimension. (shrink)