This chapter examines the doctrine in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR 1948) that human beings have a special, inherent dignity. In what, exactly, is this dignity grounded? Is dignity inborn, or is it conferred by an external authority? Is it natural or conventional? What is the significance of this concept of dignity for understanding human rights in the twenty-first century? In seeking answers to these questions, the drafters of the UDHR shall be consulted, as well as relevant perspectives from other contributors, starting with eighteenth-century framers of rights documents in the United States. Their innovations on rights and liberty will provide the necessary background for understanding the twentieth-century notion of human dignity.

As indicated by the term ‘inherent’, the Universal Declaration's drafters held that dignity belongs to human beings by virtue of their nature as human beings. However, they did not ground this understanding of human nature in a divine source such as the Creator, as appears to be the case with certain eighteenth-century rights documents like the US Declaration of Independence. This was a conscious choice on the part of the drafters so that the Universal Declaration would be secular and therefore its endorsement would not require acceptance of any particular religious worldview. At the same time, the UDHR communicates the idea that dignity and rights are inherent, rather than conventional or bestowed upon individuals by the state. This suggests a third way of viewing the modern notion of human dignity: not as the ‘old’ notion that was more or less explicitly grounded in religious concepts of human nature, nor as a ‘new’ notion that is conventional, constructed and conferred by the state. Instead, according to the Universal Declaration, human dignity simply signifies that every person is worthy of respect and that this worth is inherent rather than constructed. Although this does not resolve the tension between declaring dignity to be inherent on the one hand and declining to specify grounds on the other, the Declaration's concept of inherence does point towards certain limits in considerations of dignity to preserve its universal and objective nature.

The main aim of this investigation is to examine the notion of human dignity, particularly in the Universal Declaration, to derive an account of this concept that is historically and conceptually accurate.