Wednesday, July 12, 2017
John McIntyre - Room 201 (University of Glasgow)
In short this paper consists in an analysis of the interplay between the theory and practice of "human dignity".
The starting point is an inquiry into the ways in which this phrase is mobilised on the terrain of the EU institutions, and more specifically in the European Commission’s ‘ethics lattice’ (i.e. its specific forms of institutionalisation of ethics and attendant interweaving of textual reference, practices and practitioners, also extending to other national and international settings).
The role of human dignity as primus inter pares of the European values system and of the human rights framework is interrogated and, through scrutinising its framings and contestations, human dignity is unpacked as a hybrid notion (hospitality device, boundary object) at the crossroads of diverse intellectual traditions, political epistemologies, conceptual frameworks and worldviews. The inquiry thus examines the tensions between dignity and its cognate concepts, notably indignation and autonomy.
On that basis, by probing socio-technical arrangements such as the framework of ‘consent’ giving a particular form to values of justice, solidarity, dignity and autonomy, and by mobilising ethical controversies where humanness and otherness are at stake, the paper proceeds through two further lines of analysis. Firstly it problematises the "human" in human dignity. Secondly it deploys the cosmopolitical dimensions of this essentially uncontested concept.
The conclusion then sheds summative and formative light on the plying of human dignity as the cornerstone of moral agency and as the condition of possibility of a (European) community of values.
The starting point is an inquiry into the ways in which this phrase is mobilised on the terrain of the EU institutions, and more specifically in the European Commission’s ‘ethics lattice’ (i.e. its specific forms of institutionalisation of ethics and attendant interweaving of textual reference, practices and practitioners, also extending to other national and international settings).
The role of human dignity as primus inter pares of the European values system and of the human rights framework is interrogated and, through scrutinising its framings and contestations, human dignity is unpacked as a hybrid notion (hospitality device, boundary object) at the crossroads of diverse intellectual traditions, political epistemologies, conceptual frameworks and worldviews. The inquiry thus examines the tensions between dignity and its cognate concepts, notably indignation and autonomy.
On that basis, by probing socio-technical arrangements such as the framework of ‘consent’ giving a particular form to values of justice, solidarity, dignity and autonomy, and by mobilising ethical controversies where humanness and otherness are at stake, the paper proceeds through two further lines of analysis. Firstly it problematises the "human" in human dignity. Secondly it deploys the cosmopolitical dimensions of this essentially uncontested concept.
The conclusion then sheds summative and formative light on the plying of human dignity as the cornerstone of moral agency and as the condition of possibility of a (European) community of values.
