Human Dignity and the Ethical Project: A Foundation for Universal Values

Human Dignity: A Fundamental Assumption

Kant believed that what characterizes human beings from a moral standpoint is their inherent dignity. To violate this dignity is to treat a human as a means or a tool. The end is always the person, who has intrinsic value and not a price. Therefore, they cannot be bought. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "liberty, justice, and peace are universally established values," the realization of which depends on the recognition of the dignity of all. Dignity itself is not a scientific fact; it does not belong to the vocabulary of science. Some try to deduce it from human nature, others from reason. However, describing reality as it is does not mean deducing norms from it. Intelligence and reason determine the act of a specific individual. They are a measure of saying that it is a constituent act of human dignity. All should be willing to reach this consequence.

The Human Ethical Project

Thanks to our intelligence, we have been capable of creating complete moral codes, individual rights, and addressing discrimination and rejection. We might not agree on the way to subjective happiness, as it affects each one of us differently. However, we can agree on the path to objective happiness, a way to live together and relate to others, affirming the possibility of increasing values that lead to a just life. Objective happiness does not assure my subjective happiness, but it does partially disable obstacles and provide more possibilities to create my own life plans. The foundation of morality is the affirmation of the dignity of all human beings, a basic axiom that we must accept and defend. The fundamental axiom of ethics is not formal but has content, as we are dealing with human beings and concrete acts. The common ethical project, taking advantage of the teachings of dignity, constitutes it, affirming a necessary foundation and stability: the dignity of the person. It is the fundamental ethical act: the recognition of dignity as the source of rights.

The Method of Ethics

Different Philosophical Methods

• From Aristotle, ethics has been linked with human nature. Aristotle considered that the specificity of human nature was reason. Ethics was identified with living according to reason. It was deductive reasoning from the essence of the human being.
• But when Aristotle had to give substance to this argument and address the complexities of reality, he followed a deductive process: the study of his own moral society and what was happening in other countries.
• Scholastics attempted to deduce from the philosophical concept of "nature" a moral code, but by including God as the supreme legislator.
• Kant used the transcendental method. He posited that there existed a moral law in our hearts and studied how that knowledge was possible.
• Scheler elaborated a phenomenological theory of values.

All methods are useful, but we are interested in a method to develop an ethical theory with universal morality. We use a hypothetical-deductive method, as in science. The study of moral experience and moral history is in progress in human ethics. It provides a sufficient basis to assert that the ethical model we have suggested may be desirable for any person freed of the great obstacles: extreme poverty, fear, ignorance, dogmatism, and hatred of neighbor. These are the obstacles that have a decisive influence.

The Foundations of Ethics

The basis of ethics in history, experience, and practice troubles many thinkers. Ethics cannot achieve the security necessary to obtain higher values and standards of personal will. Relativism is the great danger facing ethics. These thinkers are concerned that, in the absence of a foundation superior to mere intelligence, ethics can always be influenced by cultural factors, fashion, and political sensations. That immutable foundation, valid for all, can only be found in human nature or divine revelation. Neither solves the problem.

• The concept of "nature" is not enough because each idea put into it afterward wants to be located.
• An appeal to God is not valid for a philosophical ethic because it is knowledge that depends on faith, not reason.
• There is a third solution. When we define a human being, we distinguish between "original nature" and "second nature." In this second nature, we can find a natural law. Ethics is based on this second nature, which is instituted, established, and defined by the basic axiom of practical reason, which reads as follows: All human beings, by the mere fact of being human, have dignity and fundamental rights derived from that dignity.