Dignity In Law Research Articles

The Puzzle and Promise of Human Dignity: R v Bissonnette

For all its promise, human dignity is also a puzzle. This paper’s discussion of the use of human dignity in Bissonnette is approached from this perspective. The goal is not only to explore how human dignity is developed in the context of section 12 of the Charter but, in doing so, to also shine a light on some of the broader challenges and possibilities that courts will have to engage with when using human dignity in law. I will leave it to the reader to judge for themselves whether the use of human dignity in Bissonnette is more promise or more puzzle. I tend to see both present, and a glaring need to develop a more robust theorization of human dignity and its use in Canadian law.

What is Animal Dignity in Law?

The article seeks to understand dignity in the context of primarily European animal law. Its main claim is that the notion of dignity is used in animal law discourse to express claims of more-than-welfarism. Whereas welfarism is premised on the humane treatment of animals and the prevention of unnecessary suffering, animal dignity is premised on respect for animals. However, adopting dignity-premised legal regulation does not necessarily entail the abandonment of welfarism. Rather, jurisdictions that have adopted dignity-based animal law have left welfarist regulations mostly intact. Hence, in its current stage of development, dignity-based animal law does not replace but rather augments the welfarist regime by “plugging its gaps”. Dignity-based animal law is then identified as consisting of four aspects: non-instrumentalization, egalitarianism, flourishing, and essence-respect. Finally, the article discusses the relationship of dignity to intrinsic value, arguing that the legal recognition of animals’ dignity is neither necessary nor sufficient for a recognition of their intrinsic value as individuals.

Erin Daly, Review of Jimmy Chia-Shin Hsu, ed. Human Dignity in Asia: Dialogue Between Law and Culture

There is simply too much to say about human dignity in law and culture to be contained within the covers of one book, even when the scope is restricted to the region of Asia. Jimmy Chia-Shin Hsu’s book, Human Dignity in Asia: Dialogue Between Law and Culture, attempts to say much of it and to ignite conversations about the remainder. It lays out the meaning of dignity in law in two ways. First, it does so in country-by-country studies that investigate not only the meaning of dignity in each country, but also the constitutional, historic, and political evolutions that have shaped that meaning, and the role of apex courts in developing a culturally specific understanding of dignity in law. The book examines eight locales: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and China. Each country chapter is geographically focused: not on linkages, but on the distinctive development of dignity lawplace. While the attempts to make cross-border connections are few, we learn much about each nation’s political history, as if guided by expert tour guides. Second, the book considers dignity against the backdrop of broad cultural movements, including, most notably, the principal religious waves that flow across Asia. Asia is such a huge and diverse region of the world, that it demands attention to many of the world’s major religions, from Islam to Christianity to Buddhism, and more, as each contributor seeks both to describe the religious themes that readers may not be familiar with and to discern how human dignity is conceptualized within that religious framework.

Human Dignity as an Existentiale? On Paul Ricoeur’s Phenomenology of Human Dignity

Apart from being a pervasive concept of present-day law, human dignity is a phenomenon regularly experienced by people in their lives. Yet before any protection for it can be advanced, it is imperative that an explanation of how human dignity is at all possible be established, including a description of its constitutive figures. Paul Ricoeur made a significant contribution to the lacking phenomenology of human dignity. Despite only rarely using the term dignity directly, he identified and described its three constitutive and interdependent figures—self-esteem, self-respect, and recognition—and embedded them amongst such notions as self, identity, narrative, passivity, bodiliness, fragility, morality, and law. He activated the phenomenological, existentialist, and hermeneutic legacies in understanding human dignity and succeeded in modifying certain sharp-edged structures that have periodically been associated with the notion of human dignity. In this paper I argue that human dignity is a high-ranking topic in Ricoeur’s writings, identify and synthesize the phenomenology of human dignity scattered throughout his works, and reveal the profound existential aspects he attributed to it. Finally, I discuss and evaluate his phenomenological-existentialistic account of human dignity, particularly taking into consideration the contemporary use of human dignity in law and its associated discourses.

Relativizam, eklekticizam i dostojanstvo - Barakovo shvatanje ljudskog dostojanstva

This paper presents and examines a relativistic account of human dignity in law proposed by Aharon Barak. The first section delineates the key points of his concept of dignity and the second introduces eclecticism as a philosophical basis of dignity in law along with its shortcomings. The third section elaborates on the "primacy of the sub-constitutional level" and "society's bedrock views" as the legal underpinnings of Barak's dignity relativism. The author argues that in this account eclecticism and relativism enter into a symbiotic relationship, in which eclecticism simulates a value foundation of law, while it at the same time enables relativism coming from below. This symbiosis threatens to push the idea of human dignity into dignities of specific jurisdictions, legal cultures a step further into their separate universes, and 'Rechtsstaat' a degree closer to 'Justizstaat'.

The Application of Dignity in Law

The paper will examine the origin and conception of human dignity and try and solidify it as a jurisprudential concept or at least agree upon the broad contours of what dignity entails and how it must be applied, secondly the paper will examine how this jurisprudential concept has been applied across different jurisdictions with completely different laws and try to reach a conclusion on whether there is a broadly agreed upon definition of dignity and how it can be a regarded as a universally applicable jurisprudential concept with three fundamental components of inherent, equal and autonomous dignity.

Consensual sex work: An overview of sex-workers' human dignity in law, philosophy, and Abrahamic religions

This article explores the dignity of consensual sex-workers through multiple prisms, namely: comparative law, philosophy, and Abrahamic religions. A deontological multidisciplinary approach becomes indispensable for discussing a multi-faceted phenomenon such as sex-work.In discussing the legal aspect of the sex workers' dignity, this article analyzes two notable Supreme Court decisions that focus on the human dignity issues associated with sex work: Bedford decision of the Canadian Supreme Court and Jordan decision of the Supreme Court of South Africa.Further, this paper examines the sex workers' case, philosophically, in light of Malby's working model of human dignity. It adopts Malby's model to assess the dignity of sex workers through examining sex-workers' autonomy in their relationships with clients, pimps, brothels, and authorities.This research also provides an overview of the human dignity of sex-workers in Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.Finally, it compares sex work to same sex marriage and dwarf tossing as types of victimless crimes to emphasize the leading role of human dignity in carrying out ethical transformation.This article is restricted to consensual sex work and it draws many information from interviews with sex workers available on YouTube and Social Media. It aims at emphasizing the distinction between the dignity of the profession (sex work) and the dignity of the professionals (sex workers) throughout the multiple prisms. This distinction shows that consensual sex work does not necessarily deprive sex workers of their inherent human dignity and autonomy, and thus does not deprive them of their basic human rights.

Human Dignity in Adjudication: The Limits of Placeholding and Essential Contestability Accounts

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.