Publication details
Dvě konkurenční morální tradice a lidská důstojnost
| Title in English | Two Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry and Human Dignity |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | In the ninth chapter, Jiří Baroš takes another look at the role of constitutionalism in liberal democracies. Post-war constitutionalism was based on a value consensus of distinct moral and political traditions, one motivated by fresh experience with the horrors of communism and especially Nazism. Among these fundamental values, it was human dignity which was assigned the central place in constitutional dogmatic. However, dignity came to be understood in personalist rather that individualist terms – that is, through embeddedness of the individual in the wider social relations (this topic is also broached in the tenth chapter). After a (longish) period of “tacit consensus” and certain disinterest on the part of political and legal theorists, the concept of human dignity has recently returned to the forefront of their attention – the reason being, again, the seeming erosion of the consensus. If real, this could spell doom for human rights themselves which are oftentimes normatively grounded in the dignitarian constitutional doctrine (Germany or the Czech Republic being two examples). Baroš then overviews current debates and controversies over interpretation and philosophical justification of human dignity. He is especially interested in the Straussian distinction between “ancients” and moderns”: While the latter group, overlapping to a large extent with the liberal tradition of political thought, posits individual autonomy as the decisive criterion for dignity-based considerations, the former (exemplified by the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition) construes autonomy as merely a part of a richer conception of human dignity. The explication in this chapter is motivated by the crucial question whether liberal democracies have the internal resources to articulate some revised version of consensus over this fundamental principle of their constitutional orders. The main challenge, of course, is plurality of competing moral and political traditions which, although having partaken in the very conception of modern human rights documents, may be again sliding towards a new form of “cultural wars”. |
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