Probing Human Dignity

Probing Human Dignity from multiple disciplinary backgrounds by scholars from a variety of countries and different cultures is an intense intellectual and emotional venture. The intensity emerges from an encounter with Human dignity that challenges individuals, communities, and society at large to navigate different spheres of human action, including ethical, moral, religious, and legal realms. Difficulties arise in the attempt to bridge the conversation about Human Dignity across cultures and traditions. This volume addresses such difficulties, exploring new horizons of the discourse and offering a mosaic of the quest for Human Dignity.

Alas, the denial of a person’s dignity continues to manifest in contemporary life, through injustices often related to personal hardship, crisis, unrest, or upheaval. This collection confronts such injustices with sensitive, complex, nuanced, and academically rigorous engagement.

Each chapter begins from the understanding that recognizing and investigating Human Dignity often occurs “at the threshold”, where in times of societal crisis or individual hardship questions of Human Dignity turn into ethical, moral, and legal dilemmas. The objective of this volume is to draw on theoretical and conceptual distinctions of Human Dignity in order to inform new perspectives that probe its ambiguity. The contributors offer greater clarity and push beyond existing thresholds to develop new paradigms that cross disciplinary lines while speaking to the goals and needs of post-modern societies and individuals. Each contributor crosses into new territory to examine a pressing legal or societal issue with a new lens.

The authors worked together as an international and interdisciplinary research group within the framework of the 2nd Intercontinental Academia of the UBIAS network (University-Based Institutes for Advanced Studies). This volume reflects their journey, their fruitful collaboration, and their scholarly endeavors. The result is a collection that serves as a fresh and exciting contribution to the contemporary Human Dignity discourse.