人間の尊厳概念の歴史

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Dignity’s Due by Samuel Moyn | The Nation http://j.mp/16Zk8Hg 　人間の尊厳概念の歴史。カトリック教会との結びつき具合が興味深い。

ある概念が歴史的にどうのように展開して今にいたったのか、という議論は、私はどちらかという苦手で、しかも、評価するには莫大な知識が必要なのでであるが、私にはその知識がない・・・とほほ。


Dignity’s Due
Why are philosophers invoking the notion of human dignity to revitalize theories of political ethics?

Samuel Moyn O

In Dignity, Rank, & Rights, Jeremy Waldron―perhaps the leading legal and political philosopher of our day―argues that the notion of human dignity originated in the democratization of the high social status once reserved for the well-born. “Dignity” means rank, and Waldron argues that we are the beneficiaries of a long, gradual process that he calls “leveling up.” More and more people, he says, are treated as high-status individuals, deserving of the social respect once restricted to the solemnly oiled.


. During most of that time, the concept of dignity served to elevate some people over others rather than putting them on the same level.

　

The historical origins of dignity in terms of social status are important to Waldron because of the recent turn to another potential source―abstract philosophy―for securing human worth. Even as dignity was slowly being recognized as existing beyond aristocrats, philosophers continued their age-old struggle to identify uniquely human properties that set us above the other animals. One philosopher, however, the German Enlightenment sage Immanuel Kant, thought about human distinction precisely in terms of dignity―namely, the priceless worth conferred on us by our freedom to choose.Kant inserted a break in the great chain of being between the rest of the animals, which are subject purely to the determination of nature’s laws, and human beings, who could (he hoped) deploy their free will to make their own rules rather than slavishly obey beastly imperatives. In a difficult argument, Kant insisted that man’s “rational nature”―our ability to set ends―makes every human life of highest value, and indeed provides the basis of all value in the world.

Further, as Waldron persuasively argues, it is not possible to derive from Kant’s idea of human dignity everything that human rights law might protect. For example, the Universal Declaration makes room for economic and social protections, but how can the notion of human dignity justify the declaration’s more specific protection of unionization rights or paid vacations? Dignity seems too abstract a notion to support such specific entitlements.

Waldron’s proposal is that the universal and egalitarian implications of Kant’s kingdom of ends can be reached indirectly by allowing the democratization of high status to continue through various legal institutions.

Kings and aristocrats relied heavily on a theological worldview, with God establishing their “divine right” to rule on earth. In fact, it is extremely doubtful that Kant’s bundle of assumptions about what gives human beings dignity can be plausibly traced to European beliefs about social status, as opposed to theological premises that he struggled to reformulate in secular terms.



the party most closely associated with claims about human dignity was neither liberal nor socialist, but rather conservative and rigid in its commitment to hierarchy: the Catholic Church.

Rosen beautifully shows, however, that the Catholic notion of dignity long bolstered the vision of a highly hierarchical society. In the confusing decade of the 1930s, when Catholic social thought profoundly informed the illiberal regimes of Austria, Spain and Portugal, “dignity” seemed to refer to man’s place in a divine order in which the high rank of humans still meant their subordination to one another―notably the subordination of women to men. The first national constitution to use human dignity in a prominent way was Ireland’s in 1937; in it, “the dignity and freedom of the individual” is linked to theological virtues, and women were told―contrary to the country’s earlier liberal constitution, which the new document repealed―to find their “place within the home.”

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After 1945, Westerners generally followed the example of the Catholics in the previous decade and used the notion of human dignity to attack communism. A founding document of American Cold War politics, NSC-68, states that the point of the US campaign to contain communism was a defense of human dignity, and President Harry Truman agreed that “both religion and democracy are founded on one basic principle, the worth and dignity of the individual man and woman.”


Today, he shows, the German concept of dignity is generally secular, liberal and even Kantian in its meaning, notably in a controversial decision made after 9/11 forbidding the state from shooting down an airliner captured by terrorists. (




The 2012 Democratic Party platform referred to dignity frequently, in association with the universal human rights that liberals in the United States say are the country’s foundation, including a new emphasis on global women’s rights and global development, as well as in relation to liberal social policy like healthcare. Yet the Republican platform invoked dignity just as frequently: to inveigh against abortion and explain why it is wrong (one reason being that it offends “the dignity of women”); to insist that marriage is exclusively reserved for heterosexuals; and to support the military, warning that it must not become the site of “social experimentation.” In these usages, dignity clearly refers to a moral code above and beyond society, to which democracy must defer.


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　パラッと拾い読みしたあとの要約ですが、

　”尊厳”というのは、歴史的には、社会的高位な地位、階級を意味した、が、カントなんかが、動物と人間を区別するものとして、人間には、自由に選択する能力、目的を設定する能力があることから、付与された無上の価値としての尊厳を持ち出した、と。もっとも、　人間に尊厳があるからといって、直ちに組合団結の自由や、有給休暇の権利など特殊な権利が保障されるわけではない、と。

　カントの目的の王国が含意する、人間の価値が普遍で平等であることなどは、高位な社会的地位に与えられる扱いが、民主化して、他の人にも与えられるようになった、と見ることもできる、と。

　が、しかし、カントらの尊厳の概念は、社会的地位というより、そもそも、カソリック的な神学的意味を帯びていたのではないか、と。カソリック教会では、尊厳というのは、神の階級的秩序のなかの人間の地位を意味し、トルーマンなんかも、民主主義と宗教に共通するのは、人間の自由と尊厳を基礎に打ち立てられたものであり、人間の尊厳を守るために共産主義に対抗しなくてはならない、と叫んでいた、と。（原爆を落とされた日本人には人間の尊厳がなかったのですかねーーー空）　

　現在では、尊厳という概念は世俗化されてきているが、人間の尊厳の前には民主主義も一歩ひかなくてはいけない、社会を超越した価値として引用されることもある、と

というわけですね。

　歴史的な経緯は別として、

　ある人々に付与されてきた恩典について、他の人々もその人々と実質差異がない、として、その恩典が他の人、存在者にも、付与されるべきだ、

　という主張は倫理の歴史ではよくあることでしょう。

　例えば、動物の権利なんかは、人にも知能がないものもあり、動物にも痛みを感じるものがあるが、知能がなく痛みを感じる人間を殺してはいけないとすれば、その人々と実質同じ動物についても、殺してはいけない、といった感じの議論なわけですね。

　動物の権利を推進してきたピーターシンガーの本にたしか、Ｅｘｐａｎｄｉｎｇ　Ｃｉｒｃｌｅ というのがありましたが、その意味するところを咀嚼すると、友達の輪、というか、権利の輪に入る仲間を、白人男性から、白人女性、有色人、動物に拡げて行きましょう、というわけでしょうね。