About the project

 

Important rulings on the part of both national and international courts turn on the concept of human dignity. This project proposes to diagnose and help remedy a set of pitfalls that afflict the legal reasoning underpinning such rulings. The pitfalls in question risk rendering such rulings seriously unjust, or haphazard at best.

Appeal to human dignity in legal reasoning is often more than merely rhetorical. It is becoming common, in both judicial reasoning and relevant legal-doctrinal work, to attach to the concept significant, even decisive, argumentative weight. This is so across an extraordinarily wide range of social fields, including abortion, euthanasia, new reproductive techniques, prostitution, the scope of the foreigners’ rights or the provision of minimum income.

Some literature has already flagged up concerns about the use of the concept of human dignity in reasoning concerning particular social fields from among the preceding ones. For example, he concept has been accused of being vacuous, redundant, or contradictory, to the point of being invoked in incompatible senses by rival positions in one and the same debate (say, on abortion or prostitution). The concept has also been denounced as being a placeholder for undefended ideological stances. We are sympathetic to a number of these diagnoses but propose to confirm and expose the depth of the problem through an intersectional study: that is, a study that, unlike existing ones, is cross-jurisdictional and jointly considers the use of the concept in relation social fields that are not usually studied together.

This novel methodology is closely linked to our working hypothesis about the causes of the problem at hand. We reckon that the widespread misuses of the concept of dignity have one primary root cause: the exclusion from the field of public reason of substantive conceptions of human good. This root problem is by no means privy to debates on dignity. It must be understood against the backdrop of a rising influence in public practical discourse (both legal, political and moral) of strands of liberal thinking that make central an individual’s autonomy, understood focally as a function of an individual’s naked will, as opposed to a substantive concern for aspects of human well-being.

Only by adequately diagnosing the problem and appreciating its deeper cause(s) can the current predicament be reverted. It falls to the philosophy of law to determine whether there are or can be conceptions of human dignity that are fit to carry the normative weight they are meant to carry, while being transparent for relevant moral or political stances that both democracy and the Rule of law require to be discussed – rather than disguised.

In accordance with the above, the project’s general objectives are:

(1) [PROBLEM]: To diagnose the reach of different kinds of argumentative misuse of the concept of human dignity in judicial and doctrinal reasoning in various (selected) national and international jurisdictions;
(2) [CAUSE]: To investigate the cause(s) of such misuse, both in terms of its underlying theoretical foundation and in historical terms, demonstrating, where appropriate, philosophical errors afflicting the relevant (modern) conception of public reason;
(3) [SOLUTION]: To consider the possibility and outlines of one or more conceptions of human dignity suitable for an argumentatively transparent legal use.