Freedom and Human Dignity

Beyond Freedom and Dignity

Almost all living things act to free themselves from harmful contacts. A kind of freedom is achieved by the relatively simple forms of behavior called reflexes. A person sneezes and frees his respiratory passages from irritating substances. He vomits and frees his stomach from indigestible or poisonous food. He pulls back his hand and frees it from a sharp or hot object. More elaborate forms of...

A Concept of Human Dignity

Cloning and human dignity.

The panic occasioned by the birth of Dolly sent international and national bodies and their representatives scurrying for principles with which to allay imagined public anxiety. It is instructive to note that principles are things of which such people and bodies so often seem to be bereft. The search for appropriate principles turned out to be difficult since so many aspects of the Dolly case w...

The simple dignity of sentient life: speciesism and human dignity.

Does the very idea of “human dignity” entail some moral disrespect for nonhuman animals? Put otherwise, does the notion of “human dignity” smack of speciesism (roughly, a view whereby nonhuman, sentient individuals are denied [adequate] moral standing on essentially arbitrary grounds)? Animal advocates, like James Rachels, often allege that there is a serious clash between the traditional view ...

Bathroom behavior and human dignity.

A recent article by Middlemist, Knowles, and Matter (1976) reported on a field experiment in a men's lavatory. Men who entered a "three-urinal lavatory" at a midwestern U.S. university were subjected to one of three conditions: The unknowing subjects either urinated "alone," directly adjacent to a confederate of the experimenter, or into one urinal at a distance removed from a confederate. Anot...

Human dignity, bioethics, and human rights.

The authors analyse and assess the Universal Draft Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights published by UNESCO. They argue that the Draft has two main weaknesses. It unnecessarily confines the scope of bioethics to life sciences and their practical applications. And it fails to spell out the intended role of human dignity in international ethical regulation.