Existence and Manifestations of human dignity: Can a person be deprived of dignity?

Abstract

The criteria for assigning human dignity have been a subject of debate among researchers for years. Regardless of what criteria are chosen for human dignity, each school of thought must provide a method to identify them in people. The authors of this article consider voluntarily in choosing goodness and virtues to be the criterion. The purpose of this article is to present a method for establishing the existence of this criterion in humans and to examine the various manifestations of acting freely on what is good and virtuous by citing philosophical Islamic sources, especially the Qur'an. In this article, we will first discuss the differences among people regarding the existence of dignity and its manifestations, and move on to investigate the special conditions that can be challenging for allocation of dignity across different schools of thought. Finally, we will examine various Islamic sources to evaluate the methods of identifying human dignity in people. Our investigations show that since concepts such as “right” and “good” are of a subjective nature, there is more than one manifestation for presence of criterion of human dignity, and in practice, no one can be deprived of their dignity.

Keywords

• Humans; Personhood; Human dignity; Minority groups; Personal autonomy; Freedom; Human rights; Bioethics; Religious ethics; Islam.