“So tell me,” my friend Christopher McCrudden, the distinguished human rights lawyer, said
one day over coffee,“what do phi los o phers have to say about 'dignity'?” I had read the …

The discussion of human dignity raises such complex issues, and the issues that current
scholarship now considers central to its understanding are so daunting, that we are in …

The notion of human dignity has not fared well in contemporary moral philosophy. It seems
to have suffered the fate of notions such as virtue and honor, by simply fading into the …

In everything from philosophical ethics to legal argument to public activism, it has become
commonplace to appeal to the idea of human dignity. In such contexts, the concept of dignity …

Abstract “Understanding Human Dignity” aims to help the reader make sense of current
debates about the meaning and implications of the idea of “human dignity.” The concept of …

THE SUBJECT OF THIS counter-thesis will be human dignity, not human rights, which were
the primary topic of Professor Blackstone's thesis. In fact, I shall mention human rights even …

Rights talk dominates contemporary moral discourse. It is also having a growing impact on
the development of legal principle and doctrine. One of the best known general arguments …

WHEN I was invited by Harvard University to de-liver the William James Lectures for the year
1961, I felt immediately that it was impossible for me to decline such a flattering proposal …

" Dignity" is suddenly everywhere in law and philosophy, even though it has long been in
decline in general usage.'In a popular view, this promi-* I am grateful to Josef Ansorge for …

Proponents of dignity see it as a useful tool which solves the most important (if not all) of the
practical and theoretical problems in human rights law. Arguing against this sympathetic …