there are encouraging development within the secular tradition.The concept is explicitly discussed in a recent volume edited by Meyer and Parent,
　　　　 which explores the essential relationship between human dignity, constitutional rights, and American liberal values.Perhaps the most systematic and consistent treatment is provided by Alan Gewirth,
　　　　 who seeks to use his “dialectically necessary method” to derive the existence of human dignity.For Gewirth, the concept of human dignity contains both empirical and inherentaspects.
　　　　 While the contingent features of acquired desirable characters (such as gravity, composure, confidence, and self-respect) belong only to certain human beings and to different degrees, the intrinsic worth is shared by all human beings to an equal degree.Questions still exist, however, as to the relationship between the intrinsic and extrinsic aspects of dignity and its moral implications.In what sense is inherent dignity shared by all men, making a criminal on the par with a saint?
　　　　 Should individual differences in extrinsic dignity make any difference to one’s political and social rights?Should the notion of inherent dignity impose any duty on the person to acquire extrinsic dignity, besides giving him the right to demand respect from others--an aspect on which almost all relevant discourses so far have focused?
　　　　 ]Since these questions have not been satisfactorily answered in the existing literature primarily interested in finding justifications for individual rights, I now turn to classical teachings of Confucianism for additional insight.
　
【注释】 Parts of this paper have been presented at the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy held in Boston, MA, August 1998.I thank Professors Ni Peimin, Li Chenyang, Li Xiaorong, Jiang Tao, and Wang Qingjie for their helpful comments.I also thank Professor David Braybrooke at University of Texas at Austin and Professor Zhang Dainian at Beijing University for their encouragement and support during this project.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Preamble.

Grundgesetz, Art. I.

The Universal Declaration itself contains several “economic, social, and cultural rights”.For example,“Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization ... of economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality” (Art. 22).“Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection” (Art. 23, sec. 3).Similar statements are also contained in the Preamble of International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1966.See the collection of documents in Ian Brownlie (ed.), Basic Documents on Human Rights (2nd Ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).In all occasions the phrase “human dignity” is left undefined.

See e.g. Alan Gewirth, “Human Dignity as the Basis of Rights”, In Michael J. Meyer and William A. Parent (ed.), The Constitution of Rights: Human Dignity and American Values (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 10-28.

J. William Brennan, “The Constitution of the United States: Contemporary Ratification”, University of California at Davis Law Review, 19 (1985), p. 8; see also Jordan Paust, “Human Dignity as Constitutional Right: A Jurisprudentially Based Inquiry into Criteria and Content”, Howard Law Journal, 27 (1984), pp. 150-158.

See contributions in Wm. Theodore de Bary and Tu Weiming (ed.), Confucianism and Human Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 198.

Ibid.

Peter L. Berger, Brigitte Berger, & Hansfriend Kellner, The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 89.

Gewirth, ibid., p. 12.

A.I. Melden, “Dignity, Worth, and Rights”, In Meyer and Parent, ibid., pp. 29-46.

See, respectively, Joel Feinberg, “The Nature and Value of Rights”, Journal of Value Inquiry, 4 (1970), p. 257, and Michael J. Meyer, “Dignity, Rights, and Self-control”, Ethics, 99 (1989), p. 527.

Meyer and Parent, ibid., pp. 47-72.

Charles Murray, In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), pp. 112-129.

Louis Henkin, “Human Dignity and Constitutional Rights”, In Meyer and Parent, ibid., p. 210.

Myres S. McDougal’s notion in W. Michael Reisman and Burns H. Weston, Toward World Order and Human Dignity (New York: Free Press, 1976), pp. 48-51.

Heidegger’s reply to Sartre, see H. Spiegelberg, “Human Dignity: A Challenge to Contemporary Philosophy”, In Rubin Gotesky & Ervin Laszlo (ed.), Human Dignity: This Century and the Next (New York: Gordon & Breach Science Publishers, 1970), p. 53.

See, respectively, Jurgen Moltmann, On Human Dignity: Political Theology and Ethics (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), p. x, and Brad Stetson, Human Dignity and Contemporary Liberalism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), pp. 15-17.

Tu Weiming, “Epilogue: Human Rights as a Confucian Moral Discourse”, In de Barry and Tu Weiming, Ibid., p. 302.In the same collection of works, see also Irene Bloom, “Fundamental Intuition and Consensus Statement: Mencian Confucianism and Human Dignity”, p. 96, and compare with Cheng Chung-ying, “Transforming Confucian Virtues into Human Rights: A Study of Human Agency and Potency”, p. 146.

Of course, this does not mean that other schools, notably Daoism and Mohism, have not made significant contributions to the conceptual development; but to do justice to them would require separate paper(s).

See e.g. Li Chenyang, “Confucian Value and Democratic Value”, Journal of Value Inquiry, 31 (1997): 183-192.

For how the center of natural law doctrine in the West shifted from duty to rights around the resurgence of natural law theories in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 205-210.

For example, Herschel Baker’s book, The Dignity of Man: Studies of the Persistence of An Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1947), bears “dignity” in the title, but refers to it only sparingly in the entire book; the same is true with Ernest Bloch’s Natural Law and Human Dignity (trans. by Dennis J. Schmidt, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1986), which does not even have the word in the index.The French book by Thomas de Koninck, De la dignite humaine (Paris: Presses Universitares de France, 1995), has a general title, but is in fact limited only to child treatment (see Hugo Meynell’s book review, “Politics of Human Dignity”, In The Literary Review of Canada, February 1996, pp. 6-7).The most relevant treatment of the concept can be found in two edited works: Gotesky and Laszlo’s Human Dignity: This Century and the Next (1970) is more philosophically oriented (see especially Spiegelberg’s analytical essay), while Meyer and Parent’s Constitution of Rights: Human Dignity and American Values (1992) is by and large tied to issues arising from American constitutionalism (but see Gewirth’s contribution therein).

Spiegelberg, “Human Dignity: A Challenge to Contemporary Philosophy”, In Rubin Gotesky & Ervin Laszlo, ibid., pp. 39-62.

For a more detailed review, see J. Prescott Johnson, “Human Dignity and Nature of Society”, In Rubin Gotesky & Ervin Laszlo, ibid., pp. 317-349.

See Baker, ibid., pp. 100-105.

Vernon J. Bourke (ed.), The Essential Augustine (2nd Ed., Indianapolis: Hackett, 1974), pp. 19-32.

St. Augustine, City of God (trans. Henry Bettenson, London: Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 190-196.

Johnson, ibid., pp. 330-338.

Discourse of Methods, Book IV.

Augustine, ibid., pp. 458-463.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man (trans. A. Robert Caponigri, Washington D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1956).

Augustine, ibid., p. 195.

See Yu Ying-Shih (余英时), The Modern Interpretation of Traditional Chinese Thought 《中国思想传统的现代诠释》 (Nanjing: Jiangsu Renmin Chubanshe, 1989), pp. 24-48.For an argument that human dignity is saved by redemption through Jesus Christ, see John Warwick Montgomery, Human Rights and Human Dignity (Dallas, TX: Zondervan, 1986), p. 208.

Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (3rd Ed., trans. J.W. Ellington, Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co., 1993), sec. 411.See also Thomas E. Hill, Dignity and Practical Reason in Kants Moral Theory (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 76-96, and Leslie Arthur Mulholland, Kants System of Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 102-139.

Kant, ibid., sec. 421-423, 452-453.As Kant himself acknowledges, he is indebted to Rousseau on at least two key points: that everyone, however low in social rank, has intrinsic worth and that freedom means self-legislation (which is, for Rousseau, to make the general will one’s own will).

See H.J. Paton, The Categorical Imperative: A Study in Kants Moral Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 185-198.

Kant, ibid., sec. 428-429.For Kant’s connection between human dignity and treating man as the end, see Yang Zu-han (杨祖汉), Confucianism and Kantian Moral Philosophy 《儒学与康德道德哲学》 (Taipei: Wenjing, 1987), pp. 40-41.This notion of human being is widely accepted among Continental philosophers after Kant.Hegel states, for example, that “Man is only an end in himself (or final end) through what is divine in him--by what has from the beginning been called reason and ... freedom”.In Carl J. Friedrich (ed.), The Philosophy of Hegel (New York: Random House, 1954), p. 19.

See e.g. Meyer and Parent, ibid., p. 53.

Grundgesetz, Art. I.

See Donald P. Kommers, The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), pp. 308-309.

Ibid., pp. 312-314.

The subjective tendency is already present in Kant, who seems to have established only that human beings can think of themselves as being free.

Sartre never devoted systematic attention to the question of human dignity.His relevant concern is mostly reflected in his Existentialism and Humanism, on which my discussion here is focused.For a book by an existentialist author bearing the title of human dignity, see Gabriel Marcel, The Existential Background of Human Dignity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 128-135, 158.The discussion on human dignity there is only sporadic, however, and does little to clarify the meaning of the concept.

Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism and Humanism”. In Walter Kaufmann (ed.), Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre (Cleveland/New York: World Publising Co., 1956), pp. 291, 306.

Ibid., p. 292.

Ibid., pp. 308-309.

Ibid., p. 310.For a thorough discussion on the existentialist view of human existence and freedom, which leads to a peculiar notion of responsibility, see Sartre’s Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology (trans Hazel E. Barnes, New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), pp. 76, 565, 598, 603, 797.

Spiegelberg, ibid., pp. 51-53.For a critique of Heidegger and Sartre in comparison with Confucianism, see Yu Ying-shih 1989: 24-48; about a comparison between western and Chinese philosophy on moral personality, see Xu Fu-guan (徐复观), The Basic Characters of Confucian Spirit, Its Limitations and Rebirth 《儒家精神之基本性格、及其限定与新生》 (Hong Kong: Minzhu Pinlunshe, 1951), pp. 1-10.

Moltmann, ibid., 15-31; Montgomery, ibid., pp. 208-217.

Meyer and Parent (ed.), The Constitution of Rights: Human Dignity and American Values (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).

Gewirth, ibid., pp. 10-28.

For a similar distinction between “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” dignity made in the Christian context, see Brad Stetson, Human Dignity and Contemporary Liberalism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), pp. 15-17.

Gewirth, ibid., p. 10; compare with Melden, ibid., p. 31.

] The only exceptions are those made in the Christian context, see e.g. Moltmann, ibid., p. 10, Montgomery, ibid., p. 192.

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