Human Dignity, Democracy and other Challenges of the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Human dignity has been a much-discussed topic in contemporary debate, and it has benefited from numerous approaches stemming from the fields of philosophy, politics, ethics, psychology or the legal, social and cultural domains. Yet, the meaning of the concept can vary in clarity, leading to ambiguity of usage and approach. The aim of this paper is to examine the concept of human dignity and to assess its potential as a funda-mental value for contemporary democracies. A conceptual analysis of human dignity was conducted in the first part of the paper, embracing two essential coordinates of democracy, the political and the ethical approach. An extension of the notion of human dignity, with applications on the collective level rather than simply on the individual one, implies a set of obligations and responsibilities for the democratic state, a context that involves exploring the relationship between human dignity and human rights. In turn, democracy is a means for the constitutional state to provide both the opportunities and the adequate framework for the fullest affirmation and realisation of human dignity. The global challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic triggered a growing list of changes that highlighted new faces of democracy and respect for human dignity, aspects that were analysed in the final part of this paper. The author promotes the idea that hu-man dignity emerges as a fundamental value of democracy and that recent global chal-lenges call for a new momentum on debates of this concept.