THE IDEA OF HUMAN DIGNITY AND THE REALISTIC UTOPIA OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Abstract

Historically, the idea of human dignity as a legal concept appears later than that of human rights, and that is something that can be seen both in normative texts and legal decisions and doctrine. Nevertheless, the author maintains the theory that a close conceptual relationship has existed between both notions from the beginning, although then only implicitly. He argues, firstly, that human dignity is not a classifying term adopted subsequently to join symbolically a multitude of different rights, that it is not merely the empty expression of a catalogue of isolated and unconnected human rights, but rather the moral source which nourishes the contents of all fundamental rights. The author then examines the catalyst role played by the concept of dignity in the composition of human rights, from rational morality on one hand, and in the form of subjective rights, on the other. Finally, he maintains that the extraction of human rights from the moral source of human dignity explains the expanding political force of a specific utopia, which the author defends, both against the global rejection that human rights sometimes suffered, as against the recent attempts directed at the deactivation of their radical content.