Over the last 60 years the idea of human dignity has become increasingly prominent in the political discourse on human rights. In United Nations documents, for instance, human dignity is currently presented as the justification for human rights. In this paper I shall argue that the contemporary way in which human dignity is thought to ground human rights is very different from the way human dignity has been understood traditionally. My aim is to contrast the contemporary paradigm of dignity to a different one that has been prominent historically from Cicero onwards. My conclusion is that if one wants to use the contemporary conception of dignity, one cannot refer to the history of philosophy for support of this conception, and if one wants to use this history in support, one would have to employ a different conception of dignity that uses a different pattern of thought.
Kant's Categorical Imperative is commonly criticized as being empty, i.e., devoid of content, and therefore unable to generate any concrete duties. More specifically, the criticism is that the imperative rules out (a) too much as being morally forbidden in one respect, (b) too little in another, and (c) that it rules out maxims for the wrong reasons. In this paper I shallargue that the Categorical Imperative expresses a recognizably moral idea, and consider how it can be used reliably to generateconcrete duties. My claim is that the Categorical Imperative expresses the demand of fairness: One should not make an exception for oneself in the sense that one should not regard oneself as being something better. I shall argue that the main objections against the imperative can be answered if one asks the question: Do I (1) try to make an exception for myself (2) to a rule that I regard to beobjectively necessary?
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.