Human Dignity as a Value

Abstract

One promising candidate for entities that have an intrinsic or fundamental value seems to be human beings: We should treat other people with respect because they have a value the tradition calls “human dignity”. Yet many philosophers today prefer to understand human dignity more in terms of a norm or attitude. In my paper, I seek to explore the prospects for a value account of human dignity. Taking seriously the insights of the competing proposals, I argue in the first part that while these theories of human dignity are not blatantly wrong in attributing dignity to a norm or attitude, they are seriously incomplete if they are not supported by an understanding that also identifies human dignity as a value. In the second part, I consider and refute a number of objections which claim that value conceptions of human dignity are ill-suited to explaining the core features of human dignity.