Embodied Self-Respect and the Fragility of Human Dignity: A Human Rights Approach

Abstract

After 1945, we were confronted with the need for a new conception of human dignity, since totalitarian mass destruction had proven the fundamental violability and fragility of dignity. This chapter will argue that human dignity can no longer be seen as an “inalienable value” that we cannot lose, but as a precarious capability for basic human flourishing – and more specifically, as a potential for embodied self-respect that needs to be protected by corresponding human rights. Therefore, dignity is the explicit reason or “purpose” behind the proclamation of human rights today: as necessary legal conditions for living a life in embodied self-respect. And as a consequence, philosophy should not make the mistake of extrapolating from categorical human rights, held by all human beings just by being human, to a likewise categorical possession of dignity. Instead, it is because human beings do not have equal human dignity from the start that they all have equal human rights.