A fundamental claim of phenomenology is that the meaning of something is not given to us in the manner of abstract theoretical knowledge but arises out of our concrete, non-theoretical dealings with the world. Phenomenology rejects the idea that we need to find a priori or metaphysical grounds to justify what, by remaining faithful to our deepest experiential evidence, we in a certain sense already know to be true. It carefully attends to the nature of consciousness as actually experienced, not as represented by the tradition or abstract philosophizing or scientific theory. This leads to a method in philosophy: the careful description of things or their meanings as they appear to a ‘transcendentally reduced’ (Husserl 1991: 34 passim) consciousness, i.e. minus all prejudices and theoretical assumptions, while taking their very manner of appearance into consideration. But how does phenomenology shed light on something like the meaning of human dignity? If human dignity is not something I have to infer but something directly intuited in experience, how is it that human beings inhabit my experience in such a way that they present themselves to me as beings worthy of respect, possessing certain rights and generating correlative duties and obligations, which are essential components of their recognition?