Within the human rights discourse of the twentieth century, dignity has come to assume a central and pivotal role. Nowhere has this been made more apparent than in the Preamble to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, where dignity is understood as the foundation of ‘freedom, justice and peace in the world’. The validity and legitimacy of universal human rights has consequently shifted and now rest in the supposed dignity of all persons. Yet, if dignity is the ground or basis for human rights, what is the ground or basis of dignity?

In his magnum opus, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, Max Scheler takes the question concerning the ground of human dignity as a primary motivation. As suggested by the subtitle of the work, A New Attempt Toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism, Scheler's task is to provide a new grounding, a phenomenological rather than rationalistic grounding, for the human being as a person and, consequently, a new grounding for the dignity of the person. For Scheler, any purely formal or rationalistic account of dignity leads to the depersonalization of the human being. The ground of dignity, rather, is the absolute value of the individual person given in the act of love, an act that reveals the other as a wholly unique and irreplaceable person.