A deeply considered examination of the “common good” reconciling Catholic Social Thought with secular politics and philosophy The Second Vatican Council invites dialogue about the common good as the set of economic, political, legal, and cultural conditions for human flourishing, whether as individuals or as communities. However, some contemporary Catholic authors jeopardize this dialogue by polarizing liberalism and the common good, interpreting the commitment to individual liberty as incompatible with commitment to the common good. Human Dignity and Liberal Politics clarifies the meaning of the common good through the three lenses of Aristotelian practical philosophy, twentieth-century Catholic Social Thought, and political liberalism. It makes the case that embracing the common good does not entail a rejection of liberalism, but that a commitment to liberal politics is compatible with faithful adherence to the Catholic tradition. The book argues that liberal political philosophy is not only compatible with Catholic Social Teaching but may also be the most appropriate framework for communicating the richness of the Church’s tradition today. Furthermore, accepting political liberalism can facilitate collaboration in political life between those who hold different worldviews and foster an enriched discussion of democracy, human rights, and religious liberty. Students and scholars of Christian ethics and political philosophy will benefit from this response to the challenges of dialogue about the “common good” in the context of the resurgence of this topic.

A life of liberty and responsibility does not just happen, but requires a particular kind of education, one that aims at both a growth of the human soul and an enrichment of political society in justice and the common good. This we call a liberal education. Forgetfulness of liberty is also a forgetfulness of the multi-dimensional nature of the human person, and a diminution of political life. Keeping in mind what can be lost when liberal education is lost, this volume makes the case for recovering what is perennially noble and good in the liberal arts, and why the liberal arts always have a role to play in human flourishing. Each of the authors herein focuses on the connection of three primary themes: human dignity, liberal education, and political society. Intentionally rooted in the hub that joins the three themes, each author seeks to unfold the contemporary significance of that hub. As a whole, the volume explores how the three themes are crucial to each other: how they illuminate each other, how they need each other, and how the loss of one jeopardizes the wellbeing of the others. In individual chapters, the authors engage various relevant aspects of liberal education. As a result, the volume is organized into three parts: Liberal Education and a Life Well Lived; Thinkers on Dignity and Education in History; Contemporary Topics in Dignity and Education. As education is increasingly channeled into an ever more narrow focus on technical specialization, and measured against professional success, students themselves face a maelstrom of campus politics and competing political orthodoxies. These are among the issues that tend to militate against the operative liberty of the student to think and to speak as a person. This edited collection is offered as an invitation to think again about the liberal arts in order to recover the meaning of education as the authentic pursuit of the good life or eudemonia.

The author of Human Dignity and Contemporary Liberalism argues that the nature and application of contemporary liberalism is significantly dissonant with the deepest inclinations and most persistent moral sentiments of human beings, and it therefore distorts human self-understanding and defaces human dignity. This mismatch between human nature and the essence of contemporary liberalism hobbles our public life, and—the author suggests—is the Gordian knot that must be loosed if the new millennium is to manifest a more humane and satisfying American civitas. This wide-ranging book begins with a discussion of certain consequences and implications of contemporary liberalism's heavy emphasis on individual rights, moving into a reflection on two general categories of human dignity, suggesting that there is in contemporary liberal thought a lack of clarity concerning the meaning and gravity of this concept. The focus then shifts to the idea of desert or deservingness. The viability of desert, rightly understood, is advanced as a useful general concept for understanding American public life, and as an important tool for restoring a measure of common sense to our politics. The second section of the book concentrates on the actual application of contemporary liberalism's values as it has occurred since the 1960s, particularly in the culturally contentious areas of race and abortion. Emerging from this survey is an unflattering image of a political paradigm which, according to the author, must be abandoned, or at least radically revised, if America is to strike a posture of moral intensity and genuine social understanding.

That human dignity matters politically is widely affirmed, yet how it matters remains unresolved. This book aims to settle that question.

This book argues that human dignity and law stand in a privileged relationship with one another. Law must be understood as limited by the demands made by human dignity. Conversely, human dignity cannot be properly understood without clarifying its interaction with legal institutions and legal practices. This is not, then, a survey of the uses of human dignity in law; it is a rethinking of human dignity in relation to our principles of social governance. The result is a revisionist account of human dignity and law, one focused less on the use of human dignity in our regulations and more on its constitutive implications for the governance of the public realm. The first part conducts a wide-ranging moral, legal and political analysis of the nature and functions of human dignity. The second part applies that analysis to three fields of legal regulation: international law, transnational law, and domestic public law. The book will appeal to scholars in both philosophy and law. It will also be of interest to political theorists, particularly those working within the liberal tradition or those concerned with institutional design.

This special issue investigates the meaning of justice and dignity and how they have changed over time. What do we mean by human dignity? How do we understand and interpret that meaning? How has it evolved?

This book makes a significant contribution to the on-going international dialogue on the meaning of concepts such as human rights, humanity, and cosmopolitanism. The authors propose a new agenda for research into a Critical Theory of Human Rights. Each chapter pursues three goals: to reconstruct modern philosophical theories that have contributed to our views on human rights; to highlight the importance of humanity and human dignity as a complementary dimension to liberal rights; and, finally, to integrate these issues more directly in contemporary discussions about cosmopolitanism. The authors not only present multicultural perspectives on how to rethink political and international theory in terms of the normativity of human rights, but also promote an international dialogue on the prospects for a critical theory of human rights discourses in the 21st century.

Technicians of Human Dignity traces the extraordinary rise of human dignity as a defining concern of religious, political, and bioethical institutions over the last half century and offers original insight into how human dignity has become threatened by its own success. The global expansion of dignitarian politics has left dignity without a stable set of meanings or referents, unsettling contemporary economies of life and power. Engaging anthropology, theology, and bioethics, Bennett grapples with contemporary efforts to mobilize human dignity as a counter-response to the biopolitics of the human body, and the breakdowns this has generated. To do this, he investigates how actors in pivotal institutions —the Vatican, the United Nations, U.S. Federal Bioethics—reconceived human dignity as the bearer of intrinsic worth, only to become frustrated by the Sisyphean struggle of turning its conceptions into practice.

In recent years, there has been an explosion of writing on the topic of human dignity across a plethora of different academic disciplines. Despite this explosion of interest, there is one group – critical legal scholars – that has devoted little if any attention to human dignity. This book argues that these scholars should attend to human dignity, a concept rich enough to support a whole range of progressive ambitions, particularly in the field of international law. It synthesizes certain liberal arguments about the good of self-authorship with the critical legal philosophy of Roberto Unger and the capabilities approach to agency of Amartya Sen, to formulate a unique conception of human dignity. The author argues how human dignity flows from an individual’s capacity for self-authorship as defined by the set of expressive capabilities s/he possesses, and the book demonstrates how this conception can enrich our understanding of international human rights law by making the amplification of human dignity its fundamental orientation.