This chapter offers a description of the complex interaction between power and poverty in light of the portrayal of Jesus in the canonical gospels. His message of salvation, example of solidarity with the poor, and presence in the life of the church offer a direct challenge to impersonal systems of societal arrangement that promote injustice. The Gospels provide a striking testimony for and guide to the essential work of solidarity with the poor.

This chapter analyzes a number of municipal decrees and honorary inscriptions from Campania which can be dated to the second century CE. In these texts freed persons receive honors and privileges as a reward for their benefactions towards the community. The phenomenon itself is not surprising, but most acts of generosity by freed persons were done in their capacity as Augustales. In all cases discussed in this chapter the benefactions were done on a voluntary basis after negotiations with representatives of the city’s main political bodies. The most striking aspect of these texts is the language in which the benefactors are praised. They are heralded as role models whose behavior should be imitated by their fellow-citizens and their acts of generosity are praised as contributions to the political landscape. The benefactors provide a service to the community which corresponds to the standing of the city. While these texts may not prove that freed persons at the municipal level were consistently viewed in a positive light, a case can be made that at least some of them were regarded as valued members of the community. This evidence can then be used to broaden our perspective on the integration of freed persons in Roman society.

Numerous reports addressing the care of older people have highlighted deficiencies in th provision of nutrition, hydration, and personal hygiene. Healthcare organisations may inadvertently compromise dignity by prioritising measurable targets and not placing due emphasis on the core work of looking after frail older people who are at risk of having their dignity violated.

The concept of dignity draws on ideas of dignity of merit, moral stature, and Menschenwürde (human dignity) – the dignity that each individual has as an essential component of being a human being. It is argued here that older people, as a group, are particularly worthy of the dignity of merit of wisdom, by virtue of their experience and associated understanding.

A suitable environment is important to promoting dignity; the emphasis is not only on basics like nutrition, hydration, and hygiene but on the delivery of person-centred care that encourages understanding of an older person’s life story.

Dying will come to us all (with even greater certainty than old age), and all older people have a right to respect and dignity when dying. Understanding how someone lived their life, and what was important to that person allows us to co-write the final chapter with preservation of autonomy and maintenance of dignity of personal identity.

The idea that every society ought to ensure each of its citizens an adequate standard of living is widely accepted. Martha Nussbaum has argued that such a standard should be understood as a set of capabilities adequate for a life of human dignity, an ample minimum that can be ascertained through public reasoning in each society.In this chapter the author shows why public reasoning about capabilities can be expected to support a higher standard that is optimal rather than minimal: the highest capability levels that could be sustained for everyone by the productive capacity of their society. The argument rests on a conception of equal dignity among human beings striving to live well, each in his or her own way. The first and most urgent step towards reaching this social optimum consists, at a lower level, in overcoming hardships.

A minority of countries or parts of countries have thus far accepted the legal practice of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) (euthanasia and assisted suicide), but legalising MAiD is expanding worldwide. More countries are debating legalisation of euthanasia or assisted suicide, but the nature of laws and legal practices vary greatly and both ethical and empirical assessments of current practices are the subject of much controversy. We examine the premises and evidence in the rhetoric of assisted suicide and euthanasia. We illustrate the trend with the rationale and political concerns that led to the legalisation of euthanasia in Quebec as “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAiD), and its subsequent expansion in Canada to include persons who do not suffer from a terminal illness, including persons who suffer only from a mental illness. The values of autonomy, “dying with dignity“ and their ethical and legal bases for justifying MAiD are critically analysed. The implications of practicing euthanasia, as opposed to assisted suicide are discussed, as well as proposals for a duty to die in some circumstances. We conclude by proposing that besides debating the legal, moral and practical concerns with MAiD, we should also focus on the psychological roots of our fears and ways to reduce those fears in individuals and societies.

Existing research on the rise of precarious forms of employment has paid little attention to gender and diversity challenges. Yet precarious work has damaging effects for vulnerable demographics, with women, ethnic minorities, and people with disabilities more considerably affected. This volume unpacks this research and offers insights into the role of organisations in fostering inclusive change.

This chapter develops a novel theory of meaningful work that is informed by the politics of working life perspectives and grounded in Critical Realism’s stratified theory of the human being. This combination allows us to identify the structural constraints and enablers of meaningful work as objective dimensions of meaningful work that interact with agential responses that we term subjective dimensions of meaningful work. Approaching meaningful work in this way promotes an understanding of meaningful waged work as a dynamic continuum that emerges from the interplay of its objective and subjective dimensions. The objective and subjective dimensions identify autonomy, dignity and recognition as the central pillars of meaningful waged work. The first part of this chapter recapitulates the relationship between structure and agency and establishes the key parameters of the stratified social ontology of human beings that guides our undertaking. This displays how the interplay between the structure, which is represented here as the objective dimensions of meaningful work, and the agential responses to it, encapsulated in the subjective dimensions of meaningful work, culminate in the experience of different forms of meaningful work or its absence.

Chapter 5 proposes an interpretation of Article 12 that allows for decision-making by substitutes as a last resort through relocating personhood from recognition of autonomy to recognition of dignity. It settles on a concept of dignity as inherent, as a legal principle (not a right) that underpins human rights and the CRPD, and as having five dimensions. The first dimension recognises the equal worth or value of all human beings. The second recognises autonomy as an important component of dignity for people who have autonomy but seeks to position autonomy as only one very valuable good amongst others. The third recognises dignity as reflexive and acknowledging the interdependent, interpersonal and social nature of being human. The fourth recognises personhood as embodied and particular, thereby acknowledging the residual impacts of impairment and the materiality of our lives. The fifth dimension demands an understanding of rights as interdependent and indivisible.

This chapter positions literature as a space in which polarized discourses on refugees can exist as conarratives, both acknowledging the grand scenes/sites of tragedy that produce the refugee and the refugees’ internal contextual dimensions. Utilizing Critical Refugee Studies frameworks and refugitude as conceived by Khatharya Um, this chapter reads Roxane Gay’s Ayiti as a text that balances conarratives of abjection and agency. The chapter argues that Gay’s strategic deployment of literary devices in Ayiti demonstrate how fiction can attend to both the exteriority of spectacle and the interiority of experience, thus constructing a more complete and robust conarrative framework through which the refugee can be portrayed with dignity.

No philosopher is more strongly associated with deontological ethics or is a more canonical modern moral philosopher than Immanuel Kant. In this chapter, we focus on Kant, though we begin, after a brief introduction of Kant and his historico-philosophical significance, with Rousseau. Rousseau is best known as a political philosopher, but there are elements of his thought that have great importance for moral philosophy and its history and, especially, for Kant. Kant credits Rousseau as the source of his signature claim of the equal dignity of rational persons. And Rousseau’s conception of political society as an “association” that “defend[s] and protect[s] the person and goods of each associate with the full common force,” but where each “nevertheless obey[s] only himself,” has obvious resonances with Kant’s “kingdom of ends” in which all are governed by self-legislated law. At the same time, Rousseau offers important points of contrast to Kant. Whereas Rousseau’s emphasis is essentially social and political, Kant will attempt to argue for morality as a common law binding all agents that is grounded in practical reason alone. Rousseau, by contrast, points toward an alternative grounding in sociability that is reminiscent more of Grotius, Pufendorf, Smith, and Reid.

A focus on care draws attention to the fact that ethical self-cultivation, even in traditions that foreground moral autonomy, relies upon relationships of dependence. The recognition of relational and ethical dependence is familiar to anthropologists and has long been central for feminist ethics. However, the enormous body of anthropological scholarship that has emerged on care over the last decade raises the question of ethical dependence anew. This chapter problematizes the concept of care. It asks: how might ‘care’ as a topic, and as engaged ethnographically, trouble some of the ways that ethical life more broadly has been conceived in the philosophical and anthropological literature? Conversely, how might attention to the ethical stakes of care trouble some of the rich ethnographic scholarship on care? The chapter draws most substantially on anthropological and philosophical scholarship in virtue ethics and in phenomenology to consider both the relational complexities of care and care’s ineffable and elusive ethical dimensions.