Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Foreword
- Why a handbook on human dignity?
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Human dignity from a legal perspective
- 2 Human dignity: concepts, discussions, philosophical perspectives
- Part I Origins of the concept in European history
- Part II Beyond the scope of the European tradition
- Part III Systematic conceptualization
- 19 Social and cultural presuppositions for the use of the concept of human dignity
- 20 Is human dignity the ground of human rights?
- 21 Human dignity: can a historical foundation alone suffice? From Joas’ affirmative genealogy to Kierkegaard's leap of faith
- 22 Kantian perspectives on the rational basis of human dignity
- 23 Kantian dignity: a critique
- 24 Human dignity and human rights in Alan Gewirth's moral philosophy
- 25 Human dignity in the capability approach
- 26 Human dignity in Catholic thought
- 27 Jacques Maritain's personalist conception of human dignity
- 28 Scheler and human dignity
- 29 Dignity and the Other: dignity and the phenomenological tradition
- 30 Dignity, fragility, singularity in Paul Ricœur's ethics
- 31 Human dignity as universal nobility
- 32 Dignity in the ubuntu tradition
- 33 Posthuman dignity
- 34 Dignity as the right to have rights: human dignity in Hannah Arendt
- 35 Individual and collective dignity
- Part IV Legal implementation
- Part V Conflicts and violence
- Part VI Contexts of justice
- Part VII Biology and bioethics
- Appendix 1 Further reading
- Appendix 2 Universal Declaration of Human Rights
- Index
- References
24 - Human dignity and human rights in Alan Gewirth's moral philosophy
from Part III - Systematic conceptualization
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Foreword
- Why a handbook on human dignity?
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Human dignity from a legal perspective
- 2 Human dignity: concepts, discussions, philosophical perspectives
- Part I Origins of the concept in European history
- Part II Beyond the scope of the European tradition
- Part III Systematic conceptualization
- 19 Social and cultural presuppositions for the use of the concept of human dignity
- 20 Is human dignity the ground of human rights?
- 21 Human dignity: can a historical foundation alone suffice? From Joas’ affirmative genealogy to Kierkegaard's leap of faith
- 22 Kantian perspectives on the rational basis of human dignity
- 23 Kantian dignity: a critique
- 24 Human dignity and human rights in Alan Gewirth's moral philosophy
- 25 Human dignity in the capability approach
- 26 Human dignity in Catholic thought
- 27 Jacques Maritain's personalist conception of human dignity
- 28 Scheler and human dignity
- 29 Dignity and the Other: dignity and the phenomenological tradition
- 30 Dignity, fragility, singularity in Paul Ricœur's ethics
- 31 Human dignity as universal nobility
- 32 Dignity in the ubuntu tradition
- 33 Posthuman dignity
- 34 Dignity as the right to have rights: human dignity in Hannah Arendt
- 35 Individual and collective dignity
- Part IV Legal implementation
- Part V Conflicts and violence
- Part VI Contexts of justice
- Part VII Biology and bioethics
- Appendix 1 Further reading
- Appendix 2 Universal Declaration of Human Rights
- Index
- References
Summary
The Preamble to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1966 (ICCPR) states that the rights proclaimed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 (UDHR), some of which the ICCPR aims to give effect to, ‘derive from the inherent dignity of the human person’. It is because human persons have dignity that they have human rights. The Preamble to the UDHR further states that human rights are ‘inalienable rights of all members of the human family’, possessed equally by all members of this family, all of whom have ‘inherent dignity’.
Alan Gewirth argues that agents (those with the capacity and disposition to pursue purposes voluntarily) must, on pain of contradicting that they are agents, accept and comply with the ‘Principle of Generic Consistency’ (PGC), which requires them to respect the ‘generic rights’ of all agents (Gewirth 1978: 53–8). Consequently, the PGC is a principle with which all rational action must comply. In Gewirth's terminology, the PGC is ‘dialectically necessary’, which is to say that the requirement for an agent to assent to it follows purely logically from a premise that no agent can coherently deny, namely, the claim of the agent that he, she or it is an agent.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Handbook of Human DignityInterdisciplinary Perspectives, pp. 230 - 239Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014