What does human dignity mean for the language of human rights? An exploratory analysis of Jack Donnelly's and James Griffin's accounts on human dignity and human rights

Abstract

Human dignity is a prominent topic in the academic discourse. Its ambit represents a point of interest for the legal, philosophical, theological, or political realm, just to mention a few. Human dignity and human rights are inextricably linked. For the language of human rights, human dignity makes a powerful foundational statement. However, in the scholarly context, several voices reject this postulation and the entanglement between the two concepts. These voices defend the view that human dignity does not provide any meaning for human rights and some contest even the term itself. Because of its pervasiveness, human dignity gave rise to a great amount of reasonings in the academic field. Even though this topic has already been researched from various perspectives, the current research aims to discover what human dignity means for the language of human rights by using a different approach. In this sense, the novelty is that it seeks to elaborate on the theoretical stances of a complex concept through an exploratory analysis of Jack Donnelly`s and James Griffin`s accounts on human rights and human dignity.