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.

The extraterritorial dimension of EU data protection law has inspired conflicts in jurisdiction between the EU and other States, particularly the US, which has markedly different conceptions of data privacy. In terms of processing personal data, the EU prioritises the privacy and security of that data, while the US foregrounds national security, freedom of expression, access to documents, a free and open Internet, and international trade. The EU and US attitudes to privacy can broadly be placed on a spectrum of, at one end, the EU’s focus on human dignity and, at the other end, the US’ emphasis on liberty. These distinctions are malleable and based on generalisations; they are far more nuanced than just a dignity vs liberty dichotomy. Data protection is particularly interesting because it is not nearly a universal value. The EU has an omnibus data privacy regulation and the US has fragmented, sectoral approaches. In the US, the relevant laws concern fair information practices or informational privacy, as opposed to data protection. The US legal system assigns these less normative heft, which is a beginning point for many of the jurisdictional tensions surrounding the reach of EU law.

This chapter distinguishes between and discusses the validity of different kinds of demand for recognition, which are often conflated in the literature on populism. While “equal respect” is central to democracy, not all demands for recognition are demands for equal respect. In particular, the type of respect that citizens and government must display should not be confused with esteem for people’s merits, identity, or way of life, but must consist in respect for citizen status. Demanding and granting esteem for particular traits or ways of life, as populists do, is incompatible with a pluralistic society. Further, demands for respect among populists tend to be bound up with a hierarchical idea of honor, which should be confronted with the democratic idea of respect for dignity. Although democracy is a society of equality of respect and cannot supply equal esteem for everyone, inequality of esteem can still pose a moral and democratic problem. This is because inequality of esteem under some conditions can convert into inequality of respect. Therefore, the second part of the chapter argues that democratic respect depends on a form of solidarity that counteracts the ever-present danger of inequality of esteem turning into inequality of respect.

The Introduction highlights the main research topic, the research questions, the research methodology and the course of the argument. It argues that human rights form a central normative achievement of human moral and legal history. It highlights the egalitarian epistemic foundations of the human rights project. The assumption that all human beings have equal access to normative insights empowers human beings. The research in human rights as part of an inquiry into human moral and legal understanding is one of the most interesting projects of current science. Only an approach including perspectives from history, philosophy, legal theory, law and psychology and cognitive science can hope to provide sufficiently rich insights. The inquiry is also important because of different current attacks against human rights – for instance, from human rights history and cognitive science. The epistemology of human rights needs to address in particular the rich research in moral psychology, neuroscience and cognitive science on moral and legal phenomena. Human rights considered are not only found in international law, but also in constitutional and supranational law, in ethics and politics.

The chapter addresses the constructive elements of a theory of human rights: a theory of goods (important enough to satisfy a threshold criterium), a political theory of human rights and the normative foundations of the legitimacy of human rights. The chapter develops a political theory of human rights. To this end, it surveys the most prevalent critiques of human rights, including arguments that human rights are inefficient, that they lack instrumental rationality, that they are means to economic disempowerment and that they legitimize illegitimate structures of power. Postcolonial theories of human rights are discussed, as are feminist accounts. The democratic function of human rights is reconstructed. Arendt’s aporia of human rights is the focus of further thoughts. Part of the political theory of human rights is a theory of entrenchment, their role in protecting the political subjectivity of persons and their role in constituting communities. A central thesis is that a political theory of human rights must be firmly anchored in the lessons that the Holocaust taught about the importance of the protection of human rights.

Known for its brutal descriptions of punishment – and the resistance of its narrator – The History of Mary Prince is usually read as a slave narrative that argues for abolition by way of affective appeals. While its explicit set pieces of violence and sexual humiliation played upon the sentiments of British readers, provoking an instinctual repulsion towards slavery, these scenes may have also encouraged readers to identify the enslaved as permanently degraded. Mary Prince and her editor Thomas Pringle, however, challenge this acceptable debasement of slaves by connecting the concept of honor to Prince’s physical character. In doing so, the History addresses a prejudice long-held by both abolitionists and colonialists towards the black female body and demonstrates how Romantic abolitionism could pivot from the bourgeois liberal ideal of freedom – or the negative right of non-restraint – to dignity, a positive, material affirmation of social worth. A concluding section treats the History as a prospectus – or, perhaps, Afrofuturist manifesto – for the political subject that can exist outside of the state, capitalist institutions, and even the bounds of recognizable sovereignty.

This interlude argues that Percy Shelley’s closet drama The Cenci reunites honor with affect. Refiguring Godwin’s “true honor,” Shelley suggests that the artistic depictions of his degraded heroine Beatrice Cenci prompt a different form of universal dignity – and intersubjective connection – without succumbing to a dichotomy between “concrete,” perhaps chauvinist, solidarity and feminine care. Crucial here is Shelleys suggestion about drama, which, through its logic of iterative re-enactment, reveals the material persistence of archaic honor codes, as well as the insistence of new modes of dignity.

This chapter explores the value of and bases for police legitimacy. In doing so, it distinguishes between descriptive (or perceived, popular) legitimacy, and normative legitimacy, ultimately arguing that the latter is the natural ground of democratic policing and the more critical of the two, given policing’s commitment to practical, substantive justice. One of the principal hazards of descriptive legitimacy is its ability to yield a popular perception of policing’s legitimate authority that can sanction populist sentiments, ones that do not necessarily protect minority rights or honor a commitment to pluralism. Legitimacy is critical in the police pursuit of cooperation, especially in times of epistemic uncertainty, and the argument here is that the careful pursuit of substantive justice that conforms to the requirements of normative legitimacy will yield descriptive legitimacy across a substantial part of the community, and especially among its more marginalized or vulnerable members.

This chapter considers dignity as a constitutional value in Hong Kong. The courts have invoked dignity in a small number of cases involving a limited assortment of rights. Overall this use of dignity has been uneven: while it has helped expand the scope of constitutional rights in some circumstances, dignity has functioned more restrictively in others. An examination of this jurisprudence allows for a reflection on debates about the role of dignity in comparative constitutional law more generally. Commentators have queried whether such a vague and imprecise term has any substantive meaning and whether it should be abandoned altogether. The chapter concludes that attention to context can mitigate these concerns about dignity’s indeterminacy and contribute to its development as a holistic constitutional value. The relevant context is both universal and local. It includes dignity’s position as a broad-based foundational principle in international human rights law across civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights. It also depends on domestic factors such as a jurisdiction’s constitutional framework and empirical realities that impact the realization of dignity.

In its Preamble, the Constitution of India lists dignity as one of several constitutional values. Dignity has no textual mention in the chapter on Fundamental Rights. The Supreme Court of India has, however, held dignity to be “the founding faith of the Constitution” and the “core of Fundamental Rights.” How is the special significance of dignity explained? By mapping the application of dignity by the Court, this chapter argues that judicial creativity with dignity has come at the cost of unanchored speculation about the content of dignity and uninhibited reliance on interdisciplinary academic literature. Dignity consequently figures in judicial decisions as a right, a justificatory value, and a reason for limiting individual rights. The content of dignity, however, remains perilously thin, and judicial enthusiasm has not resulted in clarity. Rather, questions arise about how extra-legal materials are employed in judicial decisions. The Indian experience, akin to several others, also raises concerns that arise when legal actors, primarily with legal expertise, employ moral and political values as justifications in constitutional rights adjudication.