The dignity approach to human rights and the impaired autonomy objection (original) (raw)
Related papers
Why Dignity is not the Foundation of Human Rights
This essay questions what is argued by many scholars today, namely that the moral concept of human dignity provides the basis for the establishment of human rights. More specifically, I critically discuss the two most prominent conceptions of human dignity, the 'status' and the 'value' (coming from the Catholic and the Kantian traditions) conceptions of dignity, which are suggested today as the foundations of human rights (sections I and II). Ultimately, I propose a different, 'duty-based' philosophical account for the justification of the latter (section III). Since 1948, human rights have been widely accepted and ratified by most countries. However, a great number of human rights violations and abuses still occur worldwide. Even if there is a broad human rights' framework, the latter is considered to be ineffective. One of the main reasons of its ineffectiveness is the fact that in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and in the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (ICESC), rights are described in abstract terms. But for human rights to be respected they have to be clear and concrete. I argue that the formulation of rights by the drafters of the major human rights documents should be supplemented by their philosophical establishment. It is argued by many scholars today that human dignity provides the basis for the establishment of human rights. In this essay, I question the claim that human dignity is the foundation of human rights. More specifically, I critically discuss the two most prominent conceptions of human dignity, namely the 'status' and the 'value' (coming from the Catholic and the Kantian traditions) conceptions of dignity, which are suggested today as the foundations of human rights (sections I and II). Ultimately, I propose a different, 'duty-based' philosophical account for the justification of the latter (section III).
How Should Human Dignity be a Ground for Human Rights? A Preliminary Exploration1
Ratio Publica, 2023
This paper explores the possible relations between human dignity and human rights and identifies the appropriate account of the relations. There are at least three crucial issues concerning human dignity as a ground for human rights. The first is whether dignity is a useful notion for human rights. Some say dignity is a useless or incoherent notion by itself, while others say dignity cannot justify human rights because it cannot demonstrate why people have the rights equally. The paper rejects both of these. The second issue is about the connection between the two notions. Some say that support for dignity does not entail support for human rights, while others say that the support for human rights does not involve support for human dignity. Through examination, the paper supports the statement that the support for human rights entails the support for human dignity (primarily, the article supports the justification that grounds human rights, at least in part, on dignity). The third issue is that of grounding: How does human dignity ground human rights? Some claim capacities are appropriate for understanding dignity, while others claim that we should add vulnerabilities in understanding the notion when it grounds human rights. The paper offers a dualistic view that accommodates both by treating interests concerning agency and equality as grounds for human rights. Finally, the paper elucidates the advantages of dualism compared to the capacity-based pluralism recently posited by Pablo Gilabert.
Towards a Philosophy of Human Rights
Current Legal Problems, 2012
Two important trends are discernible in the contemporary philosophy of human rights. According to foundationalism, human rights have importantly distinctive normative grounds as compared with other moral norms. An extreme version of foundationalism claims that human interests do not figure among the grounds of human rights; a more moderate version restricts the human interests that can ground human rights to a subset of that general class, eg basic needs or our interest in freedom. According to functionalism, it belongs to the essence of human rights that they play a certain political role or combination of such roles, eg operating as benchmarks for the legitimacy of states or triggers for intervention against states that violate them. This article presents a view of human rights that opposes both the foundationalist and the functionalist trends. Against foundationalism, it is argued that a plurality of normative values ground human rights; these values include not only the equal moral status of all human beings but also potentially all universal human interests. Against functionalism, it is argued that human rights are moral standards-moral rights possessed by all human beings simply in virtue of their humanity-that may perform a plurality of political functions, but that none of these functions is definitive of their nature as human rights. The ensuing, doubly pluralistic, account of human rights is one that, it is claimed, both makes best sense of the contemporary human rights culture and reveals the strong continuities between that culture and the natural rights tradition.
Human Rights, Human Dignity, and Power
The Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights. Ed. R. Cruft, M. Liao, M. Renzo
This paper explores the connections between human rights, human dignity, and power. The idea of human dignity is omnipresent in human rights discourse, but its meaning and point is not always clear. It is standardly used in two ways, to refer to (a) a normative status of persons that makes their treatment in terms of human rights a proper response, and (b) a social condition of persons in which their human rights are fulfilled. This paper pursues three tasks. First, it provides an analysis of the content and an interpretation of the role of the idea of human dignity in current human rights discourse. The interpretation includes a pluralist view of human interests and dignity that avoids a narrow focus on rational agency. Second, this paper characterizes the two aspects of human dignity in terms of capabilities. Certain general human capabilities are among the facts that ground status-dignity, and the presence of certain more specific capabilities constitutes condition-dignity. Finally, this paper explores how the pursuit of human rights and human dignity links to distributions and uses of power. Since capabilities are a form of power, and human rights are in part aimed at respecting and promoting capabilities, human rights involve empowerment. Exploring the connections between human rights, capabilities, and empowerment provides resources to defend controversial human rights such as the right to democratic political participation, and to respond to worries about the feasibility of their fulfillment. This paper also argues that empowerment must be coupled with solidaristic concern in order to respond to unavoidable facts of social dependency and vulnerability. A concluding section identifies some commonalities and differences with the approach to the ontological underpinnings of human rights presented by Carol Gould in her contribution to this volume.
On Human Rights: Two Simple Remarks
Critical Legal Thinking; forthcoming in Costas Douzinas and Conor Gearty eds, The Meanings of Human Rights: The Philosophy and Social Theory of Rights, Cambridge University Press (2013)
Journal of Global Studies, Vol. 9 (March 2019), pp. 1-24. Kyoto: Doshisha University., 2019
Recently, vigorous debate has emerged in the field of the philosophy of human rights. Currently, opponents argue against so-called naturalistic theories that view human rights as possessed by all persons in virtue of humanity. In particular, the notion of human dignity, often appealed to by naturalistic theorists, is widely challenged. The purpose of this paper is to defend the notion of human dignity as a grounding value of human rights as well as naturalistic theories against criticisms. To accomplish this, the paper is structured as follows. First, it shows that in influential theories of human rights such as the one offered by James Griffin, the notion of human dignity in contemporary human rights documents is treated as providing important guidance for grounding human rights. Second, the paper defends dignity from Andrea Sangiovanni’s series of recent counter-arguments. To begin with, although Sangiovanni criticises three traditions of dignity, namely Aristocratic, Christian, and Kantian ones, it is pointed out that the best mixed theories of these traditions can avoid many of his criticisms. This paper, however, considers his two concerns regarding the Aristocratic tradition and one pertaining to all three traditions as worthy of examination, and thus responds to him. The paper shows that his three criticisms are ungrounded and the notion of dignity can work in a theory of human rights. Third, this paper defends naturalistic theories, by analysing and replying to Sangiovanni’s criticisms of Griffin’s view. Sangiovanni insists that naturalistic theories, inter alia Griffin’s, cannot distinguish human rights from other moral rights. The paper points out that the core of this criticism is a replication of an already suggested dilemma of the ‘austere’ and ‘rich’ interpretations of normative agency. It then argues that even Griffin’s theory can demonstrate an appropriate threshold of distinguishing human from other rights by considering ‘practicalities’ while proposing provisos for them. Finally, the paper analyses Sangiovanni’s alternatives to dignity and naturalistic theories: an idea of ‘integral sense of self’ and a context-sensitive human rights theory. The paper doubts that his idea of an integral sense of self can succeed as a genuine alternative to dignity. This is because, first, support for this idea requires engaging in the very controversy among naturalistic theories: which interests should ground human rights. Second, the idea uses the exact same theoretical resources of practicalities as those in typical naturalistic views. The paper also claims that naturalistic theories are needed to deal with the shortcomings of Sangiovanni’s context-based view of human rights, such as the inseparability of contexts, and (even if separable) too much of the calculative burden of human rights for individuals in each context. Based on the present investigation, the paper concludes that to guide our language community of human rights, we still need naturalistic theories and dignity-based views are promising candidates among these; i.e. we still need an idea of humanity with dignity.