Die Sackgassen des Humiliationismus in Metaphysik oder Positivismus

A common approach to human dignity is to define it by paradigmatic cases of its violations. These violations are often called humiliations; hence, theories of this sort can be called humiliationism. Humiliationists claim that their theory can avoid metaphysical justifications of human dignity. In this article, I show that humiliationism fails in this regard. Humiliationists must implicitly take recourse to those metaphysical preconditions that they tried to evade. If they do not, their theories must unconvincingly reduce human dignity to a contingent positive norm or social practice. But these findings must not lead to dignity scepticism. Instead we should distinguish justifiable from unjustifiable metaphysical arguments. The method of defining human dignity by its paradigmatic cases helps to identify and understand human dignity, but it cannot replace its philosophical (and sometimes cautiously metaphysical) justification.