Human Dignity

In the post-9/11 context, citizenship in the global North has been reoriented towards the concept of public security. Much of this lay in political rhetoric definitions of who is a threat to the security of a nation state, with a particular emphasis on the 'threat-ening Other'. The 'war on terror' motivated governments to revoke the citizenship of such persons. In February 2019, the British teenager Shamima Begum was branded as such, and swiftly had her citizenship stripped, which the UK authorities justified as a necessary precaution to protect the nation's safety. This article asks the core question: how does Britain embed notions of hierarchical human rights, particularly in Begum's case? The article upholds two key arguments. First, the revocation of citizenship suggests hierarchical notions of humanity, whereby the state's obligations to its constituents differ depending on each individual's socially constructed racial and gender identities. Second, the legitimization of exceptionalist security politics suggests the deployment of differentiated conceptions of the state's obligations to its citizens. The case of the revocation of Begum's citizenship illustrates how persistent colonialist and stratified conceptions of citizenship enable the demotion of a citizen to a bare human or homo sacer.

According to Hans Jonas (1903–1993), the modern technological progress endowed humanity with wondrous power, which in the long run risks altering the nature of human action. This is especially true for the realm of collective action, the effects of which evidence an unpredicted issue: the ecological crisis, which is the “critical vulnerability” of nature to technological intervention. This discovery brings to light that the whole biosphere of the planet has been added to that which human beings must be responsible for because of their power over it. There is, however, a further dimension of vulnerability (and responsibility) to be considered, namely the one which characterizes organic life as such. Indeed, the essence of all living organisms–human beings included–is characterized by vulnerability, given their precarious and unstable condition of “needful freedom” towards the environment. Nevertheless, terrestrial life flourished through a multifaceted and unplanned (thus, again, vulnerable) evolution of living forms, ranging from bacteria to human beings – these evidencing a unique degree of freedom, which Jonas refers to as a “metaphysical gap” towards other living beings. The problem is that the present-day technology provides the possibility to manipulate the very essence of life and human nature. Is this process to be accepted and accomplished? And what about the related risks? Indeed, according to Jonas, issues such as genetic manipulation, euthanasia, organ transplantation, assisted reproduction, exploitation of other living beings etc., raise ethical dilemmas which can be addressed thanks to the idea of vulnerability. This notion has, according to Jonas, a metaphysical background, which he describes as follows: in the beginning, the Divine chose to give itself over to the chance, risk and endless variety of becoming. In order that the world (and life, and human freedom) might be, God renounced his own being, divesting himself of his deity. Thanks to this mythical account, the previous levels of vulnerability (concerning nature, life, and human nature) gain further clarification as signs of something sacrosanct.

While ‘classical’ human identity has kept philosophers busy since millennia, ‘Digital Identity’ seems primarily machine related. Telephone numbers, E-Mail inboxes, or Internet Protocol (IP)-addresses are irrelevant to define us as human beings at first glance. However, with the omnipresence of digital space the digital aspects of identity gain importance. In this submission, we aim to put recent developments in context and provide a categorization to frame the landscape as developments proceed rapidly. First, we present selected philosophical perspectives on identity. Secondly, we explore how the legal landscape is approaching identity from a traditional dogmatic perspective both in national and international law. After blending the insights from those sections together in a third step, we will go on to describe and discuss current developments that are driven by the emergence of new tools such as ‘Distributed Ledger Technology’ and ‘Zero Knowledge Proof’. One of our main findings is that the management of digital identity is transforming from a purpose driven necessity towards a self-standing activity that becomes a resource for many digital applications. In other words, whereas traditionally identity is addressed in a predominantly sectoral fashion whenever necessary, new technologies transform digital identity management into a basic infrastructural service, sometimes even a commodity. This coincides with a trend to take the ‘control’ over identity away from governmental institutions and corporate actors to ‘self-sovereign individuals’, who have now the opportunity to manage their digital self autonomously. To make our conceptual statements more relevant, we present several already existing use cases in the public and private sector. Subsequently, we discuss potential risks that should be mitigated in order to create a desirable relationship between the individual, public institutions, and the private sector in a world where self-sovereign identity management has become the norm. We will illustrate these issues along the discussion around privacy, as well as the development of backup mechanisms for digital identities. Despite the undeniable potential for the management of identity, we suggest that particularly at this point in time there is a clear need to make detailed (non-technological) governance decisions impacting the general design and implementation of self-sovereign identity systems. FULL VERSION AVAILABLE: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3454513

Historically, the dominant understanding of human dignity was contingent, by which we mean that, according to this view, dignity was regarded as depending on a person’s social position or behaviour. A loss of social rank or immoral behaviour meant that it was possible to lose one’s dignity. However, since the time of the enlightenment, an understanding of dignity arose which claimed that dignity should be regarded as something inherent to all human beings; by its very nature, this inherent dignity could not be lost. Although there exists some controversy in both philosophy and law about the content and scope of what is meant by “dignity”, various declarations in human rights charters and constitutions refer to human dignity as the foundation of rights. This paper explores three different dimensions of dignity. Empirically, the authors will examine how German adolescents (N = 2,175) evaluate these types of dignity and we will discuss which predictors are significant. The general assumption is that different understandings of dignity exist among German youth and that religious belief, the ability to be empathic and sensitive, social class affiliation and socialization are all predictors of attitudes towards dignity. The analysis shows that empathy and religious belief are the strongest predictors.

El mal moral se define como un conjunto de acciones intencionales por medio de las cuales se lesiona la dignidad humana y, por tanto, se explica por la negación de derechos. Sin embargo, el mal moral no consiste solo en una negación de derechos, sino también en una experiencia que involucra, entre sus estrategias, la humillación: ésta puede entenderse como una experiencia compleja que implica también al cuerpo. Este artículo afirma que la humillación, como práctica social, es una forma socialmente tolerada del mal moral que incita a la deshumanización de otras personas, produciendo sufrimiento moral. Además plantea la necesidad de pensar la dignidad desde el cuerpo y considerar el sufrimiento como un criterio indispensable para resistir ante prácticas deshumanizadoras.

This paper locates the Spanish Dominican Bishop Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566) in the history of religious and political freedom in the Latin West by focusing on his contributions to the idea and practice of subjective rights for Christians and non-Christians. As a trained canon lawyer and theologian, Las Casas was shaped by medieval/early modern notions of natural freedom and natural law. In the context of the Spanish colonization of Amerindian peoples, these ideas provided a conceptual framework for developing and extending the scholastic-juristic tradition. He did this by institutionalizing a preferential option for the poor as a bishop and as a jurist advocating for a freedom from coercion in spiritual matters attentive to the religious rights of native peoples oppressed by war and the forced labor system. Before the modern nation-state or the contemporary internationalization of rights, Bishop Las Casas’s use of ecclesiastical power facilitated the enforcement of rights to protect innocent persons outside Europe, especially the poor and oppressed. His legacy remains important in the Latin American tradition of human rights.