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Dignity and the Foundation of Human Rights: Toward an Averroist Genealogy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 September 2019

Miguel Vatter Open the ORCID record for Miguel Vatter [Opens in a new window]
Miguel Vatter*
Affiliation:
Flinders University
*
Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Miguel Vatter, Business, Government and Law, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide 5001, South Australia, Australia. E-mail: Miguel.Vatter@flinders.edu.au
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Abstract

The aim of this article is to give a new reconstruction of the conception of human dignity as a pre-associative yet legal status. Such a legal conception of human dignity carries a universal legal obligation to respect the “innate” right to independence and enables us to move beyond the impasse between moral and political views of human rights. The argument has a normative and a genealogical component. The normative component shows why a legal conception of human rights is grounded on the Kantian idea of an innate legal right to independence, as well as showing that Kant adopted a legal status concept of human dignity. The genealogical component shows that the conception of human dignity as legal status undergoes a transvaluation from its ancient aristocratic to its modern democratic meaning in Dante's political thought, which is itself rooted in the western reception of Arabic philosophy, in particular political Averroism. By contrast to the Christian elaboration of dignity, the Averroist genealogy of dignity better describes the modern pursuit of an ideal of worldly happiness essentially linked with the collective attainment of public happiness through the unrestricted public use of reason facilitated by republican constitutions crowned by human rights.

Type
Article
Information
Politics and Religion , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , June 2020 , pp. 304 - 332
Copyright
Copyright © Religion and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association 2019

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