A difficult legacy: Human dignity as the founding value of human rights

The paper argues for removal from the human rights discourse of the thesis that human rights derive from human dignity. Since dignity arrived in the discourse from a theological doctrine, which is culturally and theoretically demanding, the drafters of the founding human rights documents did not define the concept or relate it to human rights in order to secure their widest possible endorsement. This indeterminacy of the concept and its potential to ground action constraints that can respond to political, social, and technological developments but cannot be justified by respect for human rights alone, together with the legacy of the original doctrine, according to which dignity grounds both rights and action constraints, motivated incorporation of the thesis into national and international laws. As illustrated by a prominent interpretation of human dignity in bioethics and biolaw, an attempt to derive both human rights and action constraints from human dignity reveals fundamental differences between them, and questions the thesis that human rights derive from human dignity.