Abstract
After 1945, we were confronted with the need for a new conception of human dignity, since totalitarian mass destruction had proven the fundamental violability and fragility of dignity. This chapter will argue that human dignity can no longer be seen as an “inalienable value” that we cannot lose, but as a precarious capability for basic human flourishing – and more specifically, as a potential for embodied self-respect that needs to be protected by corresponding human rights. Therefore, dignity is the explicit reason or “purpose” behind the proclamation of human rights today: as necessary legal conditions for living a life in embodied self-respect. And as a consequence, philosophy should not make the mistake of extrapolating from categorical human rights, held by all human beings just by being human, to a likewise categorical possession of dignity. Instead, it is because human beings do not have equal human dignity from the start that they all have equal human rights.
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- 1.
- 2.
“The dignity of the human being is untouchable. To respect and protect it is the compulsory task of all state power,” Article 1 (1) Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany (Grundgesetz) from 1949 [my translation, A.P.].
- 3.
The explanation for this is quite simple: The three older conceptions have “survived” and are still in common use today.
- 4.
This should not be confused with the central, but somehow opposite, premise of the first interpretation, that human dignity is the necessary condition for human rights.
- 5.
What I cannot demonstrate here is that every other combination seems possible but less plausible.
- 6.
Although, of course, in different languages.
- 7.
Some animals might also have dignity, but, by definition, no human dignity.
- 8.
I will come back to this crucial difference in the last part of this paper.
- 9.
See also the contributions to Part I of this volume.
- 10.
In a TV interview, a holocaust survivor once answered the question of how she managed to survive the concentration camp as follows: “Because I never lost my dignity.”
- 11.
Although most of the contributions to this volume will not really share this double assumption of “personal responsibility” and “lacking causality”, most of the violations that are discussed here can still be reconstructed as attacks on self-respect.
- 12.
Although I cannot go into detail here, this means something different for grown-up adults, embryos, the mentally-ill, disabled, comatose or even dead people. That is why the popular, but wrong claim that all these human beings are “born” with the same dignity should be reinterpreted as a normative claim about the opportunities all human beings should have, not as a description of what capacities they actually have (Brennan and Lo 2007).
- 13.
For a discussion of the central philosophical problems of further justifying this fundamental human rights claim see Menke and Pollmann (2007: ch. 2).
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Pollmann, A. (2011). Embodied Self-Respect and the Fragility of Human Dignity: A Human Rights Approach. In: Kaufmann, P., Kuch, H., Neuhaeuser, C., Webster, E. (eds) Humiliation, Degradation, Dehumanization. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 24. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9661-6_17
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