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Summary

This chapter rehearses the standard intellectual history of dignity, which begins in antiquity, then moves to the Italian Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola and the eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant, and eventually reaches the twentieth-century development of dignity as a concept that has a prominent place in national constitutions and international human rights law and in the interpretative texts and legal commentaries thereon. In a final section, the chapter revisits Kant, concluding with the thought that it might not be possible to uproot the ideology of race which Kant helped to legitimate without tracing its connections to his ideas about human dignity.

A central concept in international human rights law and many national constitutions is human dignity. Departing from established approaches to dignity in philosophy and legal theory, Susan Marks takes dignity in everyday life ('dignified care', 'dignity in the workplace', etc.) as a starting point for reconsidering the concept's history and significance. The result is a highly original work which gives particular attention to colonial and post-colonial engagements with dignity, and emphasises the character of human dignity as not just an idea or abstract value, but also a lived experience that cannot be understood without reference to social structures and the inequalities and hierarchies they reproduce. If dignity is an attribute which all human beings possess purely by virtue of being human, Marks shows that it is also an element within the systemic operations of privilege and power.

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2 - The Idea of Human Dignity

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Trucanini's Stare

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2 results

2 - The Idea of Human Dignity

Summary

Trucanini's Stare