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Human Dignity of the Vulnerable in the Age of Rights pp 1–25Cite as

Vulnerability and Human Dignity in the Age of Rights

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Part of the book series: Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice ((IUSGENT,volume 55))

Abstract

The chapter emphasizes the fragility of human condition and the need for political powers and laws that pursue the protection of all individuals.

Part I points out the need for ‘the recognition of human vulnerability as a condition for the respect of human dignity’. Precariousness and frailty are constitutive features of human life. Every individual has always been characterized by dependency, by weakness… and by inexorable death. It’s the human condition, the history of our race and actually the only way of belonging to it. In a postmodern culture that exaggerates the value of aesthetics and welfare, in which the endeavour to exalt perfection over imperfection is present, the chapter suggests opening our eyes to a simple and authentic truth: human nature is fragile. It has always been defined by one characteristic: limitation, finitude.

Part II (‘Law and human rights for the inherent human dignity’) approaches the matter from a constitutional law perspective. To put it simply, it argues that legal systems should aim to ensure respect for the basic rights of individuals, not because they are intelligent or particularly skilled or talented, but just because of their human condition or, in other words, because of their natural dignity. All individuals are vulnerable, but some individuals are more vulnerable than others. If laws did not recognize and respect the natural dignity of all individuals in equal terms, these would be gravely damaged, particularly the most vulnerable ones. Laws, states and international organizations would be delegitimized, and societies would collapse. The chapter describes how international human rights instruments have emphasized the close relationship between human rights and human dignity, and more particularly, to which extent have explicitly recognized that human rights derive from the inherent dignity of the human person.

Part III (‘Taking vulnerability, human dignity and human rights more seriously’) highlights that this volume aims to deepen our understanding of the relationship between vulnerability, human dignity and human rights. This explains why this volume analyses the human dignity of the vulnerable from different perspectives (I. ethical and anthropological; II. medical and sociological; and III. historical, legal philosophical and political).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    J.J. Rousseau, Émile ou de L’education, in Oeuvres complètes IV (Dijon: Editions Gallimard, 1980), Libro IV, pp. 503–504.

  2. 2.

    A. MacIntyre, Animales racionales y dependientes. Por qué los humanos necesitamos las virtudes (Madrid: Paidos, 2001), pp.102–103.

  3. 3.

    K. Warwick, I, Cyborg (University of Illinois Press, 2004).

  4. 4.

    A. MacIntyre, Animales racionales y dependientes. Por qué los humanos necesitamos las virtudes (Madrid: Paidos, 2001), pp. 91–92.

  5. 5.

    M. Buber, Yo y tú (Madrid: Caparrós, 1993), p. 9.

  6. 6.

    L. Polo, Antropología trascendental (Pamplona: EUNSA, 1999), pp. 31–32.

  7. 7.

    J. Ortega y Gasset, ¿Qué es filosofía? Lección X. Obras Completas, vol. VII (Alianza Editorial).

  8. 8.

    H. Jonas, El principio de responsabilidad (Barcelona: Herder 1995), pp. 172–173.

  9. 9.

    J. Ballesteros & E. Fernández (eds.), Biotecnología y Posthumanismo (Cizur: Thomson-Aranzadi, 2007), p. 18.

  10. 10.

    I. Kant., Fundamentación de la metafísica de las costumbres (Madrid, Tecnos, 2005), 119–125, Ak. IV, 430–435.

  11. 11.

    J. Savulescu – N. Bostrom (eds.), Human Enhancement (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009).

  12. 12.

    V. Frankl, El hombre doliente, Barcelona, Herder, 1987.

  13. 13.

    J. Habermas, El futuro de la naturaleza humana. ¿hacia una eugenesia liberal? (Barcelona, Paidós, 2002), p. 62.

  14. 14.

    The most recent – and exhaustive – work on this notion can be seen in Aharon Barak, Human Dignity: The Constitutional Value and the Constitutional Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

  15. 15.

    Christian Tomuschat, Human Rights. Between Idealism and Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 1.

  16. 16.

    On the history of human rights, see Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard University Press, 2010); Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008).

  17. 17.

    Georg Lohmann, “How to protect ‘Human Nature’ – By Human Dignity, Human Rights or with ‘species-Ethics’ Argumentations?”, Human Rights and Human Nature (Marion Alber, Thomas Hoffmann, Jörn Reinhardt, eds.), Springer (Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice Volume 35), 2014, p. 162.

  18. 18.

    Corinna Mieth, “The Double Foundation of Human Rights in Human Nature”, Human Rights and Human Nature (Marion Alber, Thomas Hoffmann, Jörn Reinhardt, eds.), Springer (Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice Volume 35), 2014, pp. 11–22, p. 11; on this matter, see also James Griffin, On Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, nationality, species membership (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

  19. 19.

    Barak, Human Dignity: The Constitutional Value and the Constitutional Right, Chap. 3; see also José Pablo Alzina de Aguilar, “Human dignity according to international instruments on human rights”, Revista Electrónica de Estudios Internacionales 22 (2011), pp. 1–24 (available at http://www.reei.org/index.php/revista/num22/notas/human-dignity-according-to-international-instruments-on-human-rights); Roberto Andorno, “Human Dignity and Human Rights”, Handbook of Global Bioethics (H.A.M.J. ten Have, B. Gordijn, eds.) (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), pp. 45–57, particularly pp. 49–50.

  20. 20.

    International Covenants on Civil and Political, and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966), Preambles.

  21. 21.

    See http://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/inherent (accessed 30 July 2015).

  22. 22.

    See http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/inherent (accessed 30 July 2015).

  23. 23.

    See http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/es/definicion/ingles/inherent (accessed 30 July 2015).

  24. 24.

    See http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/inherent (accessed 30 July 2015).

  25. 25.

    See fn. n. 18.

  26. 26.

    Article 10 of ICCP: All persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of human person.

  27. 27.

    Two years after, in 1986, the General Assembly passed another text as the guidelines for new conventions on human rights. The text affirmed that human rights “derive from the inherent dignity and worth of human person.”

  28. 28.

    Protocol No. 13 to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, concerning the abolition of the death penalty in all circumstances (Vilnius, 3 May 2002), Preamble.

  29. 29.

    Emphasis is ours. Some rights are inherent to individuals because of their human condition, that is, for they possess a natural human dignity.

  30. 30.

    Harun Tepe, “Rethinking Human Nature as a Basis for Human Rights”, Human Rights and Human Nature (Marion Alber, Thomas Hoffmann, Jörn Reinhardt, eds.), Springer (Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice Volume 35), 2014, p. 58.

  31. 31.

    On this matter, see Human Rights and Human Nature (Marion Alber, Thomas Hoffmann, Jörn Reinhardt, eds.), Springer (Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice Volume 35), 2014.

  32. 32.

    Tepe, “Rethinking Human Nature as a Basis for Human Rights”, p. 57.

  33. 33.

    J. Mitchell, “Why study human nature”, Human nature: Theories, conjectures, and descriptions (J. Mitchell, ed.), Metuchen: The Scarecrow Press Inc., 1972, pp. 23–24: “There are, of course, no universally accepted conclusions concerning human nature. Many scholars, especially since John Locke, are of the impression the term ‘human nature’ is a genuine misnomer, and, in fact, there is no such reality at all. Like other fictional contrivances, ‘human nature’ is but a reification, having no corresponding reality in the material world (…). Most modern theory suggests that man simply is what he does. Some are tame, others wild. Some sharing, others hoarding; some monogamous, others polygamous (…). You see, so the argument goes, there is no human nature at all, only human behavior. The possibilities are infinite as to the behavior a given man, or given society, may embark upon. This point of view, which I call the man-as-neutral concept of human nature, is probably the most widely accepted posture concerning human nature among twentieth century intellectual community.”

  34. 34.

    On this matter, see A. Masferrer, “The fragility of fundamental rights in the origins of modern constitutionalism: its negative impact in protecting human rights in the ‘war on terror’ era,” Counter-Terrorism, Human Rights and the Rule of Law, ed. A. Masferrer and C. Walker (London: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013), pp. 37–60 (defending that fundamental rights have a pre-political character, in the sense that their recognition and protection is what justifies the existence of the political order itself).

  35. 35.

    D. Heyd, “Human Nature: An oxymoron”, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 28(2), p. 168.

  36. 36.

    J. Griffin, On human rights, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 14: “Natural law began as part of a teleological metaphysics capable of supporting strong interpretations of how morality is rooted in nature, and it ended up at the close of the eighteenth century in something approaching vacuity. It is not the strong, non-vacuous conceptions of natural law do not have their own considerable problems. Still, many scholastic conceptions of natural law gave us at least something to go on in deciding what natural rights there are. Once the metaphysical and epistemological background that they provided is abandoned, as it was in the course of the Enlightenment, what is left? Is enough left?”

  37. 37.

    Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), Section 125 (trans. by Walter Kaufmann): “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

  38. 38.

    M. Foucault, The order of things. An archaeology of the human sciences, New York: Vintage Books, 1994, pp. 341–342.

  39. 39.

    Tepe, “Rethinking Human Nature as a Basis for Human Rights”, p. 64.

  40. 40.

    Pope Francis, Ap. Exhort. Evangelii gaudium (24 November 2013), n. 209.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Law, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain

    Aniceto Masferrer

  2. Department of Political Sciences, Ethics and Sociology, CEU Cardenal Herrera University, Alfara del Patriarca, Valencia, Spain

    Emilio García-Sánchez

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Correspondence to Aniceto Masferrer .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Law, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain

    Aniceto Masferrer

  2. Department of Political Sciences, Ethics and Sociology, CEU Cardenal Herrera University, Alfara del Patriarca, Valencia, Spain

    Emilio García-Sánchez

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Masferrer, A., García-Sánchez, E. (2016). Vulnerability and Human Dignity in the Age of Rights. In: Masferrer, A., García-Sánchez , E. (eds) Human Dignity of the Vulnerable in the Age of Rights. Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice, vol 55. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32693-1_1

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