Human dignity: social movements invoke it, several national constitutions enshrine it, and it features prominently in international human rights documents. But what is human dignity, why is it important, and what is its relationship to human rights? This book offers a sophisticated and comprehensive defence of the view that human dignity is the moral heart of human rights. First, it clarifies the network of concepts associated with dignity. Paramount within this network is a core notion of human dignity as an inherent, non-instrumental, egalitarian, and high-priority normative status of human persons. People have this status in virtue of their valuable human capacities rather than as a result of their national origin and other conventional features. Second, it shows how human dignity gives rise to an inspiring ideal of solidaristic empowerment, which calls us to support people's pursuit of a flourishing life by affirming both negative duties not to block or destroy, and positive duties to protect and facilitate, the development and exercise of the valuable capacities at the basis of their dignity. The most urgent of these duties are correlative to human rights. Third, this book illustrates how the proposed dignitarian approach allows us to articulate the content, justification, and feasible implementation of specific human rights, including contested ones, such as the rights to democratic political participation and to decent labour conditions. Finally, this book's dignitarian approach helps illuminate the arc of humanist justice, identifying both the difference and the continuity between the basic requirements of human rights and more expansive requirements of social justice such as those defended by liberal egalitarians and democratic socialists. Human dignity is indeed the moral heart of human rights. Understanding it enables us to defend human rights as the urgent ethical and political project that puts humanity first.

This book explores human dignity, human rights and social justice based on a Chinese interdisciplinary dialogue and global perspectives. In the Chinese and other global contexts today, social justice has been a significant topic among many disciplines and we believe it is an appropriate topic for philosophers, theologians, legal scholars, and social scientists to sit together, discuss, enrich each other, and then deepen our understanding of the topic. Many of them are concerned with the conjuncture between social justice, human rights, and human dignity. The questions this volume asks are: what’s the place of human rights in social justice? How is human dignity important in the discourse on human rights? And, through these inquiries, we ask further: how is possible to achieve humanist justice? This volume presents the significance, challenges, and constraints of human dignity in human rights and social justice and addresses the questions through philosophical, theological, sociological, political, and legal perspectives and these are placed in dialogue between the Chinese and other global settings. We are concerned with the norms regarding human dignity, human rights and social justice while we take seriously into account their practice. This volume consists of two main sections. The first section examines Chinese perspectives on human rights and social justice, in which both from Confucianism and Christianity are considered and the issues such as patriotism, religious freedom, petition, social protest, the rights of marginalized people, and sexual violence are studied. The second section presents the perspectives of Christian public theologians in the global contexts. They examine the influence of Christian thought and practice in the issues of human rights and social justice descriptively and prescriptively and address issues such as religious laws and rights, diaconia, majoritarianism, general equality, social-economic disparities, and climate justice from global perspectives including in the contexts of America, Australia, Israel and Europe. With contributions by experts from mainland China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, USA and Norway, the book provides valuable cross-cultural and interdisciplinary insights and perspectives. As such it will appeal to political and religious leaders and practitioners, particularly those working in socially engaged religious and civil organizations in various geopolitical contexts, including the Korean Peninsula and Japan.

Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion presents a wide-ranging compilation of essays, spanning more than 15 countries. Organized in four parts, the articles examine the regulation and exploitation of dancers and dance activity by government and authoritative groups, including abusive treatment of dancers within the dance profession; choreography involving human rights as a central theme; the engagement of dance as a means of healing victims of human rights abuses; and national and local social/political movements in which dance plays a powerful role in helping people fight oppression. These groundbreaking papers_both detailed scholarship and riveting personal accounts_encompass a broad spectrum of issues, from slavery and the Holocaust to the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; from First Amendment cases and the AIDS epidemic to discrimination resulting from age, gender, race, and disability. A range of academics, choreographers, dancers, and dance/movement therapists draw connections between refugee camp, courtroom, theater, rehearsal studio, and university classroom.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights establishes that everyone’s dignity and freedom to develop as a person are secured through economic, social and cultural rights. This volume examines the origins of the article of the Declaration that introduced the purpose of economic, social and cultural rights in this way and recognized that every member of society is entitled to their realization through national effort and international cooperation. The article’s concepts have been the subject of significant articulation and interpretation. Accordingly, the book analyzes the meaning and application of economic, social and cultural rights and the nature of the related obligations developed in the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights and other international instruments. The book also explores the contribution of the article's legal concepts to philosophical theories of social justice and increasingly to the practice expected of States, individually and in cooperation with international organizations and non-state actors in development and other activities. This volume should provide a convenient tool for human rights advocates, practitioners, lawyers, scholars, and others involved with and interested in the role of human rights in seeking economic, social and cultural security for all.

A novel and multidisciplinary exposition and theorization of human dignity and rights, brought to bear on current issues in bioethics and biolaw. “Human dignity” has been enshrined in international agreements and national constitutions as a fundamental human right. The World Medical Association calls on physicians to respect human dignity and to discharge their duties with dignity. And yet human dignity is a term—like love, hope, and justice—that is intuitively grasped but never clearly defined. Some ethicists and bioethicists dismiss it; other thinkers point to its use in the service of particular ideologies. In this book, Michael Barilan offers an urgently needed, nonideological, and thorough conceptual clarification of human dignity and human rights, relating these ideas to current issues in ethics, law, and bioethics. Combining social history, history of ideas, moral theology, applied ethics, and political theory, Barilan tells the story of human dignity as a background moral ethos to human rights. After setting the problem in its scholarly context, he offers a hermeneutics of the formative texts on Imago Dei; provides a philosophical explication of the value of human dignity and of vulnerability; presents a comprehensive theory of human rights from a natural, humanist perspective; explores issues of moral status; and examines the value of responsibility as a link between virtue ethics and human dignity and rights. Barilan accompanies his theoretical claim with numerous practical illustrations, linking his theory to such issues in bioethics as end-of-life care, cloning, abortion, torture, treatment of the mentally incapacitated, the right to health care, the human organ market, disability and notions of difference, and privacy, highlighting many relevant legal aspects in constitutional and humanitarian law.

Philosophical interest in disability is rapidly expanding. Philosophers are beginning to grasp the complexity of disability—as a category, with respect to well-being and as a marker of identity. However, the philosophical literature on justice and human rights has often been limited in scope and somewhat abstract. Not enough sustained attention has been paid to the concrete claims made by people with disabilities, concerning their human rights, their legal entitlements and their access to important goods, services and resources. This book discusses how effectively philosophical approaches to distributive justice and human rights can support these concrete claims. It argues that these approaches often fail to lend clear support to common disability demands, revealing both the limitations of existing philosophical theories and the inflated nature of some of these demands. Moving beyond entitlements, the author also develops a unique conception of dignity, which she argues illuminates the specific indignities experienced by people with disabilities in the allocation of goods, in the common experience of discrimination and in a wide range of interpersonal interactions. Disability with Dignity offers an accessible and extended philosophical discussion of disability, justice and human rights. It provides a comprehensive assessment of the benefits and pitfalls of theories of human rights and justice for advancing justice for the disabled. It brings the moral importance of dignity to the centre, arguing that justice must be pursued in a way that preserves and promotes the dignity of people with disabilities.