Appeals to ''human dignity'' are at the core of many of the most contentious social and political issues of our time. But these appeals suggest different and at times even contradictory ways of understanding the term. Is dignity something we all share equally therefore the reason we all ought to be treated as equals? Or is dignity what distinguishes some greater and more admirable human beings from the rest? What notion of human dignity should inform our private judgments and our public life? In Neither Beast Nor God, Gilbert Meilaender elaborates the philosophical, social, theological, and political implications of the question of dignity, and suggests a path through the thicket. A noted theologian and a prominent voice in America's bioethics debates, Meilaender traces the ways in which notions of dignity shape societies, families, and individual lives. He incisively cuts through some of the common confusions that cloud our thinking on kehy moral and ethical questions. The dignity of humanity and the dignity of the person, he argues, are distinct but deeply connected - and only by grasping them both can we find our way to a meaningful understanding of the human condition.

From Human Dignity to Natural Law shows how the whole of the natural law, as understood in the Aristotelian Thomistic tradition, is contained implicitly in human dignity. Human dignity means existing for one’s own good (the common good as well as one’s individual good), and not as a mere means to an alien good. But what is the true human good? This question is answered with a careful analysis of Aristotle’s definition of happiness. The natural law can then be understood as the precepts that guide us in achieving happiness. To show that human dignity is a reality in the nature of things and not a mere human invention, it is necessary to show that human beings exist by nature for the achievement of the properly human good in which happiness is found. This implies finality in nature. Since contemporary natural science does not recognize final causality, the book explains why living things, as least, must exist for a purpose and why the scientific method, as currently understood, is not able to deal with this question. These reflections will also enable us to respond to a common criticism of natural law theory: that it attempts to derive statements of what ought to be from statements about what is. After defining the natural law and relating it to human or positive law, Richard Berquist considers Aquinas’s formulation of the first principle of the natural law. It then discusses the love commandments to love God above all things and to love one’s neighbor as oneself as the first precepts of the natural law. Subsequent chapters are devoted to clarifying and defending natural law precepts concerned with the life issues, with sexual morality and marriage, and with fundamental natural rights. From Human Dignity to Natural Law concludes with a discussion of alternatives to the natural law.

Misunderstandings about what it means for humans to be created in God's image have wreaked devastation throughout history -- for example, slavery in the U. S., genocide in Nazi Germany, and the demeaning of women everywhere. In Dignity and Destiny John Kilner explores what the Bible itself teaches about humanity being in God's image. He discusses in detail all of the biblical references to the image of God, interacts extensively with other work on the topic, and documents how misunderstandings of it have been so problematic. People made according to God's image, Kilner says, have a special connection with God and are intended to be a meaningful reflection of him. Because of sin, they don't actually reflect him very well, but Kilner shows why the popular idea that sin has damaged the image of God is mistaken. He also clarifies the biblical difference between being God's image (which Christ is) and being in God's image (which humans are). He explains how humanity's creation and renewal in God's image are central, respectively, to human dignity and destiny. Locating Christ at the center of what God's image means, Kilner charts a constructive way forward and reflects on the tremendously liberating impact that a sound understanding of the image of God can have in the world today.

We often speak of the dignity owed to a person. And dignity is a word that regularly appears in political speeches. Charters are promulgated in its name, and appeals to it are made when people all over the world struggle to achieve their rights. But what exactly is dignity? When one person physically assaults another, we feel the wrong demands immediate condemnation and legal sanction. Whereas when one person humiliates or thoughtlessly makes use of another, we recognize the wrong and hope for a remedy, but the social response is less clear. The injury itself may be hard to quantify. Given our concern with human dignity, it is odd that it has received comparatively little scrutiny. Here, George Kateb asks what human dignity is and why it matters for the claim to rights. He proposes that dignity is an “existential” value that pertains to the identity of a person as a human being. To injure or even to try to efface someone’s dignity is to treat that person as not human or less than human—as a thing or instrument or subhuman creature. Kateb does not limit the notion of dignity to individuals but extends it to the human species. The dignity of the human species rests on our uniqueness among all other species. In the book’s concluding section, he argues that despite the ravages we have inflicted on it, nature would be worse off without humanity. The supremely fitting task of humanity can be seen as a “stewardship” of nature. This secular defense of human dignity—the first book-length attempt of its kind—crowns the career of a distinguished political thinker.

239 pages

In everything from philosophical ethics to legal argument to public activism, it has become commonplace to appeal to the idea of human dignity. In such contexts, the concept of dignity typically signifies something like the fundamental moral status belonging to all humans. Remarkably, however, it is only in the last century that this meaning of the term has become standardized. Before this, dignity was instead a concept associated with social status. Unfortunately, this transformation remains something of a mystery in existing scholarship. Exactly when and why did "dignity" change its meaning? And before this change, was it truly the case that we lacked a conception of human worth akin to the one that "dignity" now represents? In this volume, leading scholars across a range of disciplines attempt to answer such questions by clarifying the presently murky history of "dignity," from classical Greek thought through the Middle Ages and Enlightenment to the present day.