Dignity as related to the human person does not appear in the 1789 Declaration of the rights of the man and of the citizen. It only appeared at the time in Kant’s writings on morality. Dignity, however, appears in the 1948 Universal Declaration of human rights, which is presented as a legal text. The article analyzes the difficulties –and their historical significance– of transferring this moral notion to law. The 1948 Declaration was intended to be a response to the grim events that took place between 1932 and 1945, during which all human dignity was violated. It can only do so by claiming the faith that people would have in dignity, without being able to afford to explicitly refer to Kant and his kingdom of ends. Kant›s morality gives its foundation and orientation to the law, but the law introduces a constraint that only obliges one to behave as if one behaved as a moral agent. The whole problem is in the “as if”, with which constraint and formal compliance with the law actually replace a faith that perhaps precisely the events of the period 1932-1945 have thrown down.
Navet, G. (2018). About dignity in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Revista De Filosofía, 74, pp. 153–158. Retrieved from https://revistaderechoambiental.uchile.cl/index.php/RDF/article/view/51887
