Universal Dignity Research Articles

Respecting dignity: A fundamental element of the ethical being's existence

Human dignity is a pivotal concept in contemporary ethical, political, and legal discourse. However, divergent and sometimes conflicting interpretations of human dignity contribute to confusion across various discussions. Given that all human beings possess inherent moral potential, each individual is endowed with universal dignity. The extent to which people develop their moral potential varies. Discussing an individual’s dignity, as in other medical specialties, cannot be separated from forensic medicine as a distinct medical discipline. In conclusion, the authors assert that establishing medical facts, or the truth ascertained through expert examination, serves justice by ensuring dignified treatment of the deceased, their family, and relatives. Keywords: dignity, ethics, forensic medicine, human remains

An ethical norm of long-term human survival with universal dignity

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to create an ethical norm that will help guide the human race toward long-term survival.Design/methodology/approachThe project posits a new societal ethical norm designed around a fundamental principle: the long-term survival of the human race with individual dignity. This study examines the requirements of the new norm and what is needed to achieve that goal.FindingsThere are three types of organizations that have the organizational and economic capacity to be responsible for future outcomes: governments, religions and corporations. These three types of organizations must act as if they have a moral compass that will compel them to develop and uphold the requirements for the survival of humanity with individual dignity.Research limitations/implicationsThe analysis shows that a new, broader ethical norm must be established, and this norm implies that large organizations must act with a future embracing ethical behavior.Practical implicationsThis study generates specific pathways for example: governments should adopt the just war principles and prohibitions on governments or other institutions from teaching any form of class superiority. These and other pathways are designed to diffuse threats to the fundamental principle.Social implicationsThe fundamental principle includes universal human dignity. This means that the notion of individual dignity must be defined or understood, and the requirements to attain this goal must be identified.Originality/valueThis project takes concepts from long-termism, forward-looking collective responsibility, corporate social responsibility and the global catastrophic risk institute to advocate for a new ethical norm.

Infusing courageous love for universal dignity and environmental response-ability through management education and learning: Inspired By Freire’s dream

Freire’s pedagogy is commonly applied to the education of those relegated to known dangerous socio-economic exploitation locally and globally. In contrast, we apply his concerns to ourselves as among the seemingly privileged humans on this Earth. Through this essay, we challenge uncritical assumptions embedded in the forms of The Global Market normalized (and only occasionally challenged) in much business school education. We personalize ‘The Global Market’ as a particular representation of ‘Moloch’, an ancient deity demanding human sacrifice. We depict ‘Democracy’ as Moloch’s Handmaiden. Informed by Freire’s emancipatory values, we offer a contribution to management education that is responsive to, responsible for and response- able in the realization of global justice exemplified in (but not unique to) the aspirations of the United Nations. We offer an interpretation of the radical ethics of Emanuel Levinas whose attention lies with those countless people he claims each of us to have responsibilities for. Applied to the field of management education, we reflect on whether the United Nations-led Principles for Responsible Management Education offer opportunities to progress Freire’s Pedagogy of Hope to enhance forms of management learning infused with courageous love for universal emancipation from Moloch’s harms, an emancipation we express as universal justice.

Aesthetic Wit(h)nessing in Anti-lynching Songs by Silvestre Revueltas and Carlos Chávez

Abstract Mexican composers Silvestre Revueltas and Carlos Chávez each wrote one song that execrates the lynching-murder of Black persons in the United States. In them, the composers pit a Mexican aesthetics of death against violent spectacle and social inequities to assert a universal dignity of life and to situate an antiracist position within the context of a broader international class struggle. In the process of airing fresh interpretations of the songs, I imply that the composers’ divergent experiences in the United States—Chávez’s relative proximity to establishment structures of power and Revueltas’s intimacy with working-class struggle and race-based discrimination—informed their translation of Black suffering into the (differently historically colonized) context of Mexico. Both composers effected an artful indirection: a displaced deictic center from which to mediate their social thought concerning Mexico’s own problems of penal excess and extrajudicial lynching. Bracha Ettinger’s aesthetically activated Matrixial dimension sets a theoretical and analytical stage for an exploration of these anti-lynching songs and offers a way of understanding aesthetic expressions of allyship in a transhistorical mode.

On the Interpretive Significance and Limitation of the Confucian Concept of Virtuous Dignity

Modern Confucian scholars generally use the view of “virtuous dignity” in the modern interpretation of the idea of dignity. This view emphasizes that human dignity comes from the realization of human moral potential. The human nature thought of the theory of good nature is the value basis of this view. Due to the excessive attention to human dignity, the Confucian concept of moral dignity does not pay enough attention to “universal dignity”. I think the Confucian theory of moral dignity should take freedom rather than the realization of moral potential as the basis of dignity, so as to recognize the equality of human dignity in the sense of legal rights and the inequality in the sense of moral virtue.

Об актуальности антропосоциоэкологического подхода в философской антропологии и философии цивилизационных процессов

Abstract. The authors of the article present the idea of an anthroposocioecological approach in philosophical anthropology and philosophy of civilizational processes, working on the approved state budget research topic “Anthroposocioecological configurations of modern philosophy of the XXI century”. Attracting the scientific thought of academician V.S. Stepin, who identified such major global crises of technogenic civilization as ecological and anthropological, problems of “transhumanism”, the concept of “inorganic body of civilization”, universals of civilizational and cultural development, the article reflects modern philosophical knowledge, rethinking the concept of “nature — man — society — individual” from the point of view of the anthroposocioecological approach. The main part of the article formulates the prerequisites and essence of the anthroposocioecological approach in the context of modern challenges and examines the philosophical and ethical component of the anthroposocioecological approach. At the same time, the authors single out the anthroposocioetic component, placing in the center an ethical problem that goes beyond the boundaries of ethics proper as a philosophical science, and which in modern knowledge falls into a broad ideological field and practice-oriented actions. The essence of the anthroposocioecological approach in modern philosophy is characterized by ideological and ethical universals, including universal life values. The relevance of the anthroposocioecological approach is due to the significance of such a supreme macroethical universal as human dignity, starting from the virtue of feeling one’s own subjective psychologically experienced dignity to the conscious recognition of state-national and universal dignity in the new multipolar world order. In the light of the latest innovations in computer technology, the authors pay attention to the problems of power, responsibility and dignity in a multipolar world, which, according to the authors, are associated with an anthroposocioecological philosophical and prognostic approach, given the powerful technological progress and the “clash” of technogenic and traditionalist civilizations. The authors express the hope that an anthroposocioecological philosophical approach based on value universals in the future will take place in the analysis of Russian, Asian and European positive experience in the formation of a new type of intercultural interaction. Among the practical goals of the anthroposocioecological approach, it is important to cooperate at different levels of corporations, global communities based on ideological and ethical universals. At the end of the article, it is argued that the anthroposocioecological approach, due to a new stage of civilizational development, rethinking human dignity in a multipolar world, is an urgent problem in modern philosophical anthropology and philosophy of civilizational processes.

Musical/Textual Double Consciousness in W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk

Besides introducing groundbreaking critical concepts such as double consciousness, colour line and the veil, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) was among the first books to attribute universal dignity to black music. It did so by devoting a whole chapter to the ‘sorrow songs’, seen as “the articulate message of the slave to the world”, as well as by opening each chapter with epigraphs composed of bars of ‘black’ spirituals juxtaposed with lines of poetry by notable ‘white’ authors – Symons, Lowell, Byron, among others – in a musical/textual version of double consciousness. Reconsidering the composite formal structure of The Souls of Black Folk and the role of the spirituals as ceaseless reminders of freedom, the paper explores the ways in which Du Bois’s speculations on black music foreshadow contemporary sonic/textual strategies.

Clinical Legal Education: Human Rights, and Arts and Crafts Cafés

This practice report provides an account of two outreach projects that enabled different community groups, members of staff at Royal Holloway, University of London, and students at Royal Holloway’s Legal Advice Centre, to discuss human rights in an accessible and relatable way, which empowered the delegates, and encouraged open dialogue. At the first event, Royal Holloway and the Afghanistan and Central Asian Association collaborated to host an online Being Human café as part of the Being Human 2020: a Festival of Humanities programme organised and set up annually by the School of Advanced Study, University of London and funded through the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy. The café “Afghan Women Small Spaces Café: Sewing Pathways to Human Rights” took place via Zoom. Meeting over Afghan tea and cake, participants - from the public, generally from the Afghan diaspora community and researchers - used mixed participatory methods including artwork, sewing and conversation to explore what everyday habits and material objects tell us about ourselves and each other. Working with these, and other culturally specific lived experiences, Marshall linked her research, on human rights law’s purpose of ensuring universal dignity, equality and rights, to French writer Georges Perec. Following this style of Café, the authors created the Autism Legal Rights Café, in partnership with the Sycamore Trust U.K. At this second event, Marshall’s research on everyday spaces was developed into a short talk about law, everyday spaces, objects and being human at a focused arts and crafts workshop for young women with autism. Particularly during Covid-19 lockdown, it was explored how and why our objects took on a new meaning. This talk included an analysis of Species of Spaces where Perec traced what is truly daily, those everyday habits and material objects of which our lives consist, what goes without saying. Perec claims, although these do not seem to pose any problems, we need to ask what they may tell us about what is important in life, what makes it worth living.

The Confucian concept of human dignity and its implications for bioethics.

Human dignity is a crucial concept in contemporary ethical, political and legal studies. However, people have different, even opposite understandings of human dignity, which has caused lots of confusion in related discourses. The Confucian notion of human dignity provides an important perspective for reflecting various theories of human dignity. In Confucian ethics, the basis of human dignity is the moral potential that every human being naturally has. Moral potential grants everyone universal dignity, while the development of moral potential grants people acquired dignity. Since all human beings have moral potential to the same extent, everyone owns universal dignity equally. Different people develop their moral potential to different extents. One's acquired dignity is positively associated with the development of her moral potential. Universal dignity is a moral status but acquired dignity is not. To pursue acquired dignity is the moral demand of universal dignity and protects people's universal dignity. Confucian discussions on human dignity provide not only a way to justify the equality of human moral status, but also a way to justify the moral obligation of protecting and developing human nature, thereby constituting a reliable theoretical basis for coping with ethical issues caused by biomedical technologies today.

Respect My Right to Dominate

In this article, we present how the recognition framework of political and historic representation has enabled reactionary political forces, which increasingly recognize its inner contradictions and turn them against the basic principle of universal dignity, with the clear aim of corroding the whole recognition political edifice from the inside out. Taking the field of the symbolic construction of European identity as our main focus, we will reconstruct how the takeover of recognition politics has destabilized political and historic representation in Europe and ended up undermining European integration rather than enhancing it. Following one of the most important theorists of political and historic representation, Frank Ankersmit, we introduce the conceptual distinction between antifoundationalist vs. founda-tionalist representation in order to account for the series of decisive institutional changes that since the 1970s have contributed to the intersection of two separate fields into ‘memory politics’ and led to the rise of a new and inherently non-democratic foundationalism, of which recognition politics is one of the main symptoms.

Human Dignity and Rights in the Context of Gender and the Sacramental Priesthood

Abstract This paper considers the question of women’s ordination to the sacramental priesthood in the context of human dignity and rights. Differentiating between two forms of ontological or intrinsic dignity – the universal dignity of the human being made in the imago Dei, and the particular dignity of those baptised into the imago Trinitatis – it argues that the refusal of ordination to women is a violation of baptismal dignity that constitutes a refusal of women’s rights. It analyses the arguments against women’s ordination and shows them to be based on a misreading of Thomas Aquinas, on the innovative concept of sexual complementarity which has replaced the earlier hierarchical model of sexual difference, and on appeals to mystery that might be better described as mystification. It concludes that the refusal to allow women to respond to the call to ordination is based on a modern form of essentialised sexual difference that is alien to the Catholic tradition and that violates Christological orthodoxy, insofar as it suggests that women are not able to image Christ.

Raees as Macbeth-A transcultural adaptation

Literary adaptation is a process, which reproduces the pre-existent literary piece of work into a series of altering characters, settings, actions, and storylines. Adaptations of canonical texts of great authors such as Shakespeare had won the universal dignity. By using Hutcheon’s adaptation theory, this research aimed to scrutinize the impact of the transcultural adaptations of Macbeth as Raees by Government College University Dramatic Club, Lahore. The reception of Shakespeare as the manifestation of the British culture involved many social, cultural, and political factors that were analyzed in this research by using Hutcheon’s concept of "indigenization" (2103:150). I had collected data from source texts, scripts, articles, interviews, observations, questionnaires, and group discussions. The Government College University Dramatic Club, Lahore team made the variations in the text to make it appropriate to the native/local culture. These variations were significant in making the transcultural adaptation as a success in the native culture.

Birth with dignity from the Confucian perspective.

The development of biotechnologies has broadly interfered with a number of life processes, including human birth. An important moral question arises from the application of such medical technologies to birth: do biotechnological advancements violate human dignity? Manyvalid arguments have been raised. Yet bioethicists are still far from reaching a consensuson how best to protect the dignity of human birth. Confucianism is an influential ethical theory in China and presents a distinctive understanding of human dignity. In this paper, we reconstruct the two Confucian concepts of dignity-namely, universal dignity and personal dignity. We then apply these concepts to human birth in the context of biotechnologies involving embryos and genetic enhancement. We conclude that the dualConfucian understanding of dignitycontributes a valuable perspectiveto the question of whether biotechnologies related to human birth violate human dignity.

“Bless Thy Blue Panorama …”: The Cosmopersonalism and Historiosophic Irony of Maximilian Voloshin

The year 2017 is not only the centennial of two Russian revolutions, but also an anniversary for one of its most prominent witnesses, the artist, poet, and essayist Maximilian A. Voloshin (1877–1932). Voloshin’s highly original philosophical viewpoint is best defined as “cosmopersonalism.” Unlike the standard representatives of Russian cosmism (Vladimir I. Vernadsky, Alexander L. Chizevsky, Nikolai F. Fedorov), all of whom gravitated toward a collectivist, ensemble interpretation of the deepest foundations of human subjectivity, Voloshin insists on the eternal, cosmically given existence of each individual I. A cosmopersonalist philosophical belief protects from bias in politics and ideology and makes possible an ironically playful attitude toward all natural-historical processes, even catastrophic ones. During the revolutionary years, Voloshin wrote a number of works on Russia that belong to the genre of eschatological prophecy. They are contradictory, they belie one another, and, each being a tragic work when considered separately, they can be interpreted in the aggregate as a detached mental experiment in missionary historiosophical constructions (on hopes and premonitions, utopias and anti-utopias). The article argues that Voloshin outgrew eschatology sometime in the mid-1920s and began confessing a stoic version of the philosophy of “small deeds,” based on the idea that every human being has universal dignity.

Social Justice and the Legitimacy of Slavery: The Role of Philosophical Asceticism from Ancient Judaism to Late Antiquity by Ilaria L. E. Ramelli

Reviewed by: Social Justice and the Legitimacy of Slavery: The Role of Philosophical Asceticism from Ancient Judaism to Late Antiquity by Ilaria L. E. Ramelli David Konstan Ilaria L. E. Ramelli. Social Justice and the Legitimacy of Slavery: The Role of Philosophical Asceticism from Ancient Judaism to Late Antiquity. Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xvi, 293. $99.00. ISBN 978-0-19-877727-4. It is distressing to reflect on how few people in classical antiquity contemplated the abolition of slavery, even when they recognized, as many decent and enlightened individuals did, that the human beings they owned as property were no different from themselves. In this learned and wide-ranging book, Ramelli documents with an impeccable mastery of the relevant texts composed in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Syriac the philosophical and theological arguments on slavery from the Bible down through late classical antiquity. Many rejected Aristotle’s claim that some human beings were by nature less than wholly rational and so were best off subject to the mastery of others, yet even so they did not challenge the existence of the institution of slavery itself, although they might entertain doubts about its legitimacy. Ramelli concludes that it was only among ascetics, [End Page 275] whether practicing their self-discipline privately or in communities such as the Therapeutae, that the idea of a life without servitude took on material form. Here, however, the absence of slavery was one aspect of a general renunciation of property and a commitment to humble labor that had no need of servants; Christian men and women even from the nobility might undertake to perform the most menial tasks in imitation of the poverty and self-sufficiency of the apostles, and they regarded their former slaves, when they too adopted the monastic way of life, as their equals in Christ, not in the future aeon predicted by Paul but in the here and now. This might indeed have been fertile ground for the development of a doctrine concerning the universal dignity of mankind and the essential injustice of slavery in any form. Yet the generality of the injunction against excessive wealth (and one could make do with very little), which might even assume the radical form of the condemnation of riches as theft, seems to have displaced attention from the specific issue of slavery as such, objections to which have a basis not only in arguments for economic justice but also in beliefs about the nature of humanity. A tendency to interpret slavery as moral subservience to vice, as found in Stoic and Christian texts, also tended to inhibit opposition to the social institution. It emerges from Ramelli’s meticulous survey of the sources that only one figure in antiquity appears to have argued against slavery systematically and on these grounds to have recommended the immediate liberation of slaves. This was Gregory of Nyssa, indeed one of the most liberal and fascinating figures in early Christian thought. Gregory, who was the brother of Basil of Caesarea and came from a family of ascetics and saints, maintained that all human beings are free and sovereign by virtue of being an image of God, and that the equality of humans is “a reflection of the equality of the Persons of the Trinity” (218). To these two arguments he added also an eschatological thesis based on his belief in apocatastasis, that is, the return of the world at the end of time to its original, prelapsarian condition, when, as Christians in general held, there was no slavery; apocatastasis is a topic on which Ramelli has written extensively (on one occasion, in collaboration with the present reviewer). Ramelli argues that Gregory’s notion of the telos is not merely speculative or proleptic but “is normative already for the present life, precisely because it represents the fulfilment of God’s will” (218). This is why he could urge his congregation to manumit their slaves then and there. Tying Gregory’s extraordinary recommendation to his flock to his complex theology must remain to some degree uncertain, since he does not explicitly present his attitude to slavery as a function of these premises; but it is a plausible inference...

The Core Meaning of Human Dignity

The concept of human dignity is relatively new in international and domestic constitutional law. Dignity is protected as a value or a right, or both, in international law and many domestic jurisdictions. It is difficult to define human dignity in a legal context, as the concept is not defined in the first international document which recognizes inherent human dignity and the protection thereof, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1946) and many international (and national) documents enacted thereafter. Despite dissensus regarding the widespread use of the concept, dignity has come to display three elements in constitutional adjudication post World War Two: the ontological element which entails that human beings have equal inherent human dignity that cannot be waived or diminished; the second element being the claim that inherent human dignity has to be recognised and respected; and the limited-state claim as the third element which entails that states have a positive obligation to progressively realise human dignity through the mechanism of socio-economic rights. It is widely accepted that these elements root in Kantian moral ethics which holds that man's autonomy is based upon universal dignity, as a result of which man should never be used as a means to an end, but only as a means in himself. Kant expressed this idea through formulation of a categorical imperative, namely that everyone's inherent human dignity has to be respected and protected universally. The preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1946), article 1(1) of the German Basic Law and section 10 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 embody the elements of Kant's categorical imperative. As a result, the three elements are applied as a definitional term of human dignity in German and South African constitutional adjudication. Based on these elements, it can be argued that the current idea of universal inherent dignity, at least in German and South African law, comports with Kant's ideal that man should never be used as a means to an end.
 

A Combustible Combination: McCloskey on Ideas, Institutions, and Economic Performance Through Time

McCloskey’s Bourgeois Equality explains the Great Enrichment of man beginning in the early 19th century as being caused by what we refer to as a “combustible combination” of ideas, institutions, and commercial practices. Economic growth for McCloskey is not just a function of the security of property rights, as her critique of Douglass North’s depiction of the Glorious Revolution indicates, but the increasing the scope of market exchange brought about by the spread of Bourgeois ideas. The ability of a society to realize the gains from productive specialization and mutually beneficial exchange, as well as the benefits of peaceful social cooperation among diverse peoples is made possible only through the adoption of ideas that legitimate and institutions that recognize the universal dignity to commercial practices such as capital accumulation, trade, and entrepreneurship.

Zionist and Palestinian Honor and Universal Dignity in Israeli Cinema

This article offers a film analysis of Israeli films which, it claims, embrace or critique Israel’s Zionist and Palestinian perceptions of honor, as compared with universal human dignity. The article groups together and examines six acclaimed Israeli feature films that, it argues, present and comment on Zionist and Palestinian perceptions of honor, as well as human dignity. The Israeli-Zionist Kazablan (1973) and the Israeli-Palestinian Wedding in Galilee (1987) each construct an ideal version of Zionist and Palestinian honor codes and mentalities, respectively. More critical and recent films, James’ Journey to Jerusalem (2003), Attash (2004) and Ajami (2009), suggest that these happy ideals conceal monstrous shadow images that undermine the reverence and promotion of human dignity. Finally, Bethlehem (2013) is read as portraying both Zionist and Palestinian mentalities concerning honor as macho, adolescent, insensitive and hurtful. According to this reading, Bethlehem demonstrates how both honor codes preclude the adherence to and cherishing of universal human dignity, locking the two nations in an eternal blood feud.

Locke on Equality

Scholars overlook that Locke has two distinct concepts of equality entrenched in his political theory. By recovering the centrality of natural law in Locke, these two concepts of equality can be easily identified. The first I call “natural equality,” which includes every human being regardless of rational capacity, each possessing rights to life, liberty, and property. The second is “law-abiding equality,” which includes the subset of people who adequately recognize the dictates of natural law. This distinction is significant because it helps overcome the conflict in liberalism between universal dignity and the necessarily exclusionary character of citizenship.

MacIntyre and Nussbaum on Diversity, Liberalism, and Christianity

ABSTRACTThis article argues that the politics of difference has been unsuccessful in its attempt to liberate itself from the modern politics of universal dignity and self-determination. As a result, theorists who emphasize difference ultimately must find a way to balance a conception of diversity with that of a universal normative ethics. To make this case, I examine the virtue ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre and Martha Nussbaum as two different examples of this tension, one constructing a particularistic virtue ethics around specific traditions, while the other presents a universalistic virtue ethics around universal human experience, thus serving as an example for how the “right” and “left” engage with diversity. There is a common denominator to the virtue ethics of MacIntyre and Nussbaum in that they both go about this by reconstructing an ethics of character out of elements of Aristotle's ethics of virtue in his Nicomachean Ethics as the basis for a model of pluralism and do so within a modern liberal and hence rational–individualist framework. Both are critical of certain elements of Aristotle's thought, while attempting to recover the “true” essence of Aristotelianism. While those who identify with the different political extremes are diverse, one basic premise is that the former believes in the role of tradition and the values of slow change in dialogue with the past, while the latter advocates the good of all individuals within a state that is blind to differences notwithstanding the practices of the past. Each approach faces a significant weakness: tradition is often unable to recognize that social benefits have often been brought about by modern liberalism's rejection of tradition, while universal human experience tends to forget that universal thinking is not universal but is a liberalization of a particular Christian way of approaching the world.