Human Dignity, Human Rights, and Responsibility - 9780262017978

"Human dignity" has been enshrined in international agreements and nationalconstitutions as a fundamental human right. The World Medical Association calls on physicians torespect human dignity and to discharge their duties with dignity. And yet human dignity is aterm--like love, hope, and justice--that is intuitively grasped but never clearly defined. Someethicists and bioethicists dismiss it; other thinkers point to its use in the service of particularideologies. In this book, Michael Barilan offers an urgently needed, nonideological, and thoroughconceptual clarification of human dignity and human rights, relating these ideas to current issuesin ethics, law, and bioethics. Combining social history, history of ideas, moral theology, appliedethics, and political theory, Barilan tells the story of human dignity as a background moral ethosto human rights. After setting the problem in its scholarly context, he offers a hermeneutics of theformative texts on Imago Dei; provides a philosophical explication of the value of human dignity andof vulnerability; presents a comprehensive theory of human rights from a natural, humanistperspective; explores issues of moral status; and examines the value of responsibility as a linkbetween virtue ethics and human dignity and rights. Barilan accompanies his theoretical claim withnumerous practical illustrations, linking his theory to such issues in bioethics as end-of-lifecare, cloning, abortion, torture, treatment of the mentally incapacitated, the right to health care,the human organ market, disability and notions of difference, and privacy, highlighting manyrelevant legal aspects in constitutional and humanitarian law.