Human Dignity

The word in first place

In Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union, human dignity is named first among the values. The same goes for the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, whose first article says only this: “Human dignity is inviolable. It must be respected and protected.” Only after that come the right to life, liberty, equality and the rest.

The order is no accident. We saw in Lecture 5 that the European project was born after an experience in which people were treated as things: counted, sorted, used and eliminated. Europe’s answer after 1945 was a simple sentence: in every person there is something that cannot be used, bought or sacrificed, however great the benefit to others.

Dignitas: dignity as rank

The word comes from the Latin dignitas. For the Romans it meant above all rank, prestige, worthiness: the dignity of a senator, of a consul, of a noble family. Such dignity was earned, inherited and could be lost. It set people apart rather than making them equal. The meaning survives in English, in the word “dignitaries”.

Among the Romans, however, a second, broader meaning also appears. Cicero writes in On Duties (I, 106) that if we consider “the superiority and dignity of our nature”, we understand how shameful it is to live in luxury and pleasure, like the animals. Here dignity no longer depends on social rank but on being human, on the reason that distinguishes us from animals.

The biblical tradition added a third source: the human being created “in the image and likeness of God” (Genesis 1:26–27). If every person bears this image, then the slave, the stranger and the poor also have a worth that no one can take from them. We saw this root in Lecture 2.

Dignitas (Lat.): for the Romans, a person’s social rank and prestige, earned through offices and honours. Example: a consul’s dignity was greater than an ordinary citizen’s.

Pico della Mirandola: the human being who makes himself

In 1486 the Italian humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) was preparing a disputation in Rome on 900 theses. The Pope banned it, and the opening speech was published after Pico’s death under the title Oration on the Dignity of Man, becoming one of the manifestos of the Renaissance.

Pico tells the story of creation in a new way. Every creature has been given a fixed place in the world: the animals their nature, the angels their place. When man was created, there was no free place left. So the Creator said to Adam:

“We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor any endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgement and decision.”Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486)

Human dignity, then, lies in freedom. Man has no fixed nature: he can sink towards the animals or rise towards the divine. Dignity is no longer a rank granted by society but everyone’s capacity to give their own life its shape. We will meet this intuition again in Kant, under the name of autonomy.

When you choose what to study or what kind of person you want to become, you are doing exactly what Pico describes.

Five sources, five meanings

At first, dignity set people apart. Gradually it became what makes them equal. Each meaning has left a trace: “dignitary” keeps the Roman sense, the equal worth of the weak comes from the Bible, and the “free development of the personality” in constitutions comes from Pico.

When someone invokes “dignity” in a debate, ask yourself in which of these senses they are using it. We will see that this matters.

Two kinds of command

We met Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) in Lectures 3 and 4. Now we read the work containing the most influential formulation of the idea of dignity: the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785).

Kant distinguishes two kinds of command. The first depends on a goal: “If you want to pass the exam, study.” The second commands unconditionally. For Kant, morality takes the second form: do not lie, not because lying “will come back to bite you”, but because lying is wrong.

Categorical imperative: in Kant, the moral command that binds unconditionally, regardless of your goals or desires. It is opposed to the hypothetical imperative, which says “if you want X, do Y”. Example: “Do not lie” is categorical; “Be polite if you want to be liked” is hypothetical.

The formula of humanity: mind the word “simply”

Kant formulates the categorical imperative in several ways. The first formula requires you to act only on a rule (a “maxim”) that you can will to become a universal law. The second, the formula of humanity, is the one that concerns us here:

“Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.”Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Ak 4:429

Kant does not forbid us to make use of one another. In a taxi, the driver is a means for me to get home, and I am a means for him to earn money. That is fine: we both agree and each pursues his own ends.

The wrong begins when I treat the other person simply as an instrument: when I lie to them, coerce them or manipulate them so that they can no longer agree to what is happening to them.

Examples: when a person becomes a tool

The extreme case is human trafficking, which hit the Republic of Moldova painfully in the 1990s and 2000s: a person is bought and sold like a commodity. But far more ordinary situations can also be analysed with Kant’s formula.

In each example, ask yourself: could the person agree to what is being done to them, if they knew the whole truth? If not, they are being treated simply as a means.

Price and dignity

In the same text, Kant draws a distinction that underlies the modern idea of dignity:

“In the kingdom of ends everything has either a price or a dignity. What has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; what on the other hand is raised above all price and therefore admits of no equivalent has a dignity.”Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Ak 4:434

Things have a price: one phone can be replaced by another, a car can be sold. Persons have dignity: a human being cannot be replaced by another “of equal value”, and a human life cannot be placed on a scale against an economic benefit.

Where does this worth come from? For Kant, from autonomy: the human being is a rational being who can give himself the moral law. Precisely because he can choose ends, he is an end in himself.

The practical consequence is enormous: what has no price is not weighed. We cannot torture a person “for the good of the majority”, and we cannot carry out medical experiments on people without their consent, not even for a treatment that would save thousands of lives. Here Kant parts ways with utilitarianism, which judges actions only by their consequences for the greatest number.

Dignity (in Kant): the inner worth of a person, which is above every price and cannot be replaced by an equivalent. Example: you can buy someone’s work, but not the person.

Dignity enters constitutions

Until the twentieth century, dignity was a philosophical and theological idea. It entered legal texts only after 1945, as a response to totalitarianism. The Basic Law of Germany (1949) opens with the sentence “Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar”: human dignity is inviolable. The country that had lived through Nazism built its whole constitution on this sentence.

The Constitution of the Republic of Moldova (1994) states in Article 1(3) that Moldova is a democratic state governed by the rule of law, in which “human dignity, human rights and freedoms, the free development of the human personality, justice and political pluralism are supreme values and are guaranteed”. The phrase “free development of the personality” is, in legal language, Pico’s very idea.

What the Charter of Fundamental Rights is

The European Communities were economic at first, and their treaties had no list of rights: the Court of Justice protected them through its case law. To make them visible to citizens, the EU drafted the Charter of Fundamental Rights, proclaimed in Nice on 7 December 2000. It became legally binding on 1 December 2009, when the Treaty of Lisbon entered into force, giving it the same value as the Treaties (Art. 6 TEU).

The Charter has 54 articles, grouped into six titles of rights and one title of general provisions.

Why is Article 1 about dignity?

The official Explanations relating to the Charter state that dignity “is not only a fundamental right in itself but constitutes the real basis of fundamental rights”. The Charter is like a tree: dignity is the root, and freedoms, equality, solidarity, citizens’ rights and justice are the branches.

Each right protects one aspect of dignity: freedom of expression, the person who thinks; a fair trial, the person who may not be punished arbitrarily; social rights, the person whom poverty would humiliate.

There is also an important difference. Almost all the rights in the Charter can be limited, under the conditions of Article 52. Dignity, by contrast, is declared inviolable: it is not weighed against other interests. Likewise, the prohibition of torture (Art. 4) is absolute: no emergency and no war can justify it.

Inviolable: something that may not be violated or limited in any case, not even for a legitimate aim. Example: a state may not torture a suspect even if it would learn where a bomb is hidden.

A case: the killing game

An example from EU case law shows how far the idea can go. In the Omega case (2004), the German city of Bonn banned a “laserdrome” game in which participants simulated “killing” each other by shooting at one another.

The company invoked the freedom to provide services. The Court of Justice nevertheless upheld the ban: protecting dignity is a legitimate interest that can limit the economic freedoms of the single market.

Is “dignity” an empty concept?

Dignity also has serious critics. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer ironically called it the shibboleth of moralists who have nothing left to say (On the Basis of Morality, 1840, § 8, paraphrased). In 2003 the bioethicist Ruth Macklin published an article in the British Medical Journal entitled “Dignity is a useless concept”: everything we mean by it, she argued, we can say more clearly through respect for autonomy.

A famous case illustrates the problem. In the 1990s the mayor of a French town banned a “dwarf-tossing” show. A man with dwarfism who worked in this show challenged the ban: it was his job, freely chosen. The French Council of State (1995) and later the UN Human Rights Committee (2002) upheld the ban in the name of human dignity.

Here dignity and autonomy come into conflict. Who decides what is dignified for a person: the person themselves or the state?

Check whether “dignity” has the same meaning in the mayor’s argument and in Pico. For Pico, dignity is the very freedom to choose. If the meanings differ, we have an ambiguity, and the discussion risks becoming a verbal dispute (Lecture 1).

Two systems, two texts, two courts

In Lecture 1 we distinguished the EU from the Council of Europe. Now we see why it matters: Europe has two systems for protecting rights, and confusing them is a common mistake in the press.

The first is the system of the Council of Europe. Its text is the European Convention on Human Rights, signed in Rome on 4 November 1950 and in force since 1953. Compliance with it is supervised by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg.

The second is the system of the European Union. Its text is the Charter of Fundamental Rights, and its highest court is the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Luxembourg.

When the news says that “Europe” has condemned Moldova over prison conditions, check: it is almost certainly the ECtHR in Strasbourg, a court of the Council of Europe, not of the EU.

Who can apply, and when

Anyone can apply to the ECtHR after exhausting the remedies available in their own country. The EU Charter has a limit: under Article 51, it applies to the member states only when they are implementing Union law.

The two systems are not rivals. Article 52(3) of the Charter states that rights corresponding to those in the Convention have the same meaning and scope. The Treaty of Lisbon even provides for the EU to accede to the Convention (Art. 6(2) TEU). The first agreement was rejected by the CJEU in 2014 (Opinion 2/13), and a new draft, agreed in 2023, is still going through the procedure.

Preliminary reference: the procedure by which a national court asks the Court of Justice of the EU how Union law should be interpreted in a concrete case. This is usually how citizens’ cases reach the CJEU. Example: an Irish court asked the Court whether a directive on telephone data complied with the Charter.

Moldova at the Strasbourg Court

Since Moldova ratified the Convention in 1997, the ECtHR has delivered hundreds of judgments in Moldovan cases. According to the Legal Resources Centre from Moldova, by the end of 2025 the state had been ordered to pay more than 23 million euros in compensation. The most frequent violations concern the right to a fair trial and the right to property.

Several cases are directly linked to dignity. They show that dignity is protected not only by prohibitions (“the state must not torture”) but also by positive obligations: the state must act to protect the vulnerable, including from other people.

Positive obligation: the duty of the state not only to refrain from violating a right but also to take measures so that the right is protected in practice. Example: the police must intervene when a woman asks for help against domestic violence.

Right against right

We now reach the question of the lecture. Fundamental rights do not live apart: they constantly collide. A journalist’s freedom of expression may conflict with a politician’s privacy. A parent’s religious freedom, with a child’s right to health. Public safety, with the protection of personal data.

Here we are not choosing between good and evil, but between two good things. That is why these are the hardest cases.

Conflict of rights: a situation in which exercising one person’s fundamental right limits another fundamental right, of the same person or of someone else. Example: publishing private photos of a politician in the name of the public’s right to be informed.

The first dilemma: expression and hate speech

Freedom of expression (Art. 10 of the Convention, Art. 11 of the Charter) is considered one of the foundations of a democratic society. In 1976 the ECtHR gave a formulation that has become classic:

“It is applicable not only to ‘information’ or ‘ideas’ that are favourably received or regarded as inoffensive or as a matter of indifference, but also to those that offend, shock or disturb the State or any sector of the population.”ECtHR, Handyside v. the United Kingdom, 7 December 1976, § 49

Yet the freedom to offend is not unlimited: Article 17 of the Convention forbids using rights to destroy the rights of others, and European states punish incitement to hatred and violence. Between a bad joke, harsh criticism of a religion and a message urging violence against the neighbours there is a scale. The difficulty is knowing where to draw the line. In Moldova the problem is very concrete: recent election campaigns have been accompanied by hate messages and disinformation on networks such as TikTok and Telegram.

Hate speech: expression that incites hatred, discrimination or violence against people for who they are: ethnicity, religion, sex, orientation. Example: a post calling for a minority to be driven out of town.

The second dilemma: security and privacy

After the attacks in Madrid (2004) and London (2005), the EU required telecommunications companies to keep data on all citizens’ calls for up to two years: who spoke to whom, when and from where.

Yet in the Digital Rights Ireland case (8 April 2014), the Court of Justice of the EU annulled the directive. It covered the entire population, with no link to any offence, and interfered too seriously with privacy and data protection (Arts 7 and 8 of the Charter).

In Germany, after 11 September 2001, a law allowed the armed forces to shoot down a passenger aircraft hijacked by terrorists. The Federal Constitutional Court declared it unconstitutional (15 February 2006): the state may not kill innocent passengers to save other people, because that would treat them simply as means. This is Kant’s formula applied by a court.

“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”

The first premise is false: privacy also protects the health, faith, relationships and opinions of honest people. The argument also assumes that whoever does the watching will always mean well. Above all, it shifts the burden of proof. It is not the citizen who must justify wanting privacy, but the state that must justify limiting it.

Burden of proof: the obligation to prove a claim. As a rule, it lies with whoever proposes a change or a restriction. Example: whoever wants to read your messages must show why, not you why you object.

A criterion: the proportionality test

So how do the European courts decide? Not through a fixed hierarchy of rights, except for the absolute core (dignity, the ban on torture and slavery), but through a tool called the proportionality test.

Article 52(1) of the Charter states that any limitation of a right must be provided for by law, respect the essence of the right and be proportionate: necessary and genuinely meeting an objective of general interest or the need to protect the rights of others. The test has four questions, answered in turn. If a measure fails one of them, it goes no further.

The test does not give the answer automatically, but it forces us to argue step by step: what aim, what evidence, what alternatives, what costs. It is critical thinking built into institutions.

Proportionality: the principle that limiting a right is allowed only if it has a legitimate aim, helps achieve it, is the mildest measure possible and brings more gain than cost. Example: monitoring a suspect with a judge’s approval instead of monitoring everyone.

Three answers to the question of the lecture

Hierarchy. A fixed order: life before property, security before privacy. The problem: it ignores context. Sometimes a “lesser” right is seriously harmed and a “greater” one only slightly.

Case-by-case weighing. The proportionality test, the position of the European courts. The problem: judges may end up “weighing” according to their own preferences.

An absolute core, with weighing for the rest. Dignity, the ban on torture and the essence of each right are not negotiable; the rest is weighed. This is the structure of the Charter. The problem: who sets the core? The dwarf-tossing case shows that even the core can be disputed.

Whichever answer you choose, it must be supported with arguments, not just asserted. That is exactly what the proportionality test requires.