Methodological framework of the legal category «human dignity»

Abstract

Today, having overcome painful and thorny way, legal awareness achieved certain victories and continues steadily moving towards the direction prescribed by the European values. However, the issue of fundamental human rights and liberties protection, including human dignity, becomes even more relevant. Threats and challenges daily faced by the whole nationalities, certain social groups of various countries, ethnic communities etc. induce them to seek answers, mechanisms and protection techniques in the legal sphere. For this reason, the issues of legal research methodology improvement, i.e. modernization of the scientific arsenal aimed at scientific and educational activities’ optimization, are of paramount importance. This article covers one of the overriding problems that are represented in contemporary scientific legal studies, more specifically, methodological framework of scientific and educational activities. Specific features of any legal phenomenon or category, like human dignity, sometimes require unique cognition methods to be intelligently selected by a researcher intending to achieve scientific objectives that were clearly defined previously. Correctness of choice of scientific practices and ways of developing “the truth of science” is a core component in solving scientific research problems. The article points up that in the comprehensive study of such legal category as human dignity, addressing universal (philosophical) approaches, general scientific and specific (specific scientific) methods is of vital importance. However, it is emphasized that diversity of research methods should not develop into methodical ignorance and anarchism as the application of any given method should meet specific scientific problems. At the same time, application of various scientifically grounded methods as part of study of the legal category of “human dignity” contributes to more comprehensive understanding of the legal category in question as an integral part of the ideological content of any legal system in the democratic society where the subjects endowed with rights and obligations have a chance to implement them in clearly defined legal relations. The author specifies the sense of application of philosophical approaches when studying the legal category of “dignity” indicating that such approaches should be made more specific by combination of general scientific and specific scientific methods. Keywords: legal sphere, rights and liberties, human dignity, approaches, methods.