The hermeneutics of dignity: on disability, defiance, and death

ABSTRACT Pablo Gilabert’s Human Dignity and Human Rights offers an excellent, and welcome, defense of human dignity as a foundational concept for theorizing about human rights. In this paper, I defend the thought that concepts such as human dignity have an inescapably interpretive character, resting upon particular interpretations of human acts and lives. I defend this conclusion in three distinct domains: disability, which looks to the question of how to understand the relationship between dignity and a particular physical or mental impairment; defiance, which treats of how we ought to understand unsuccessful resistance to injustice; and death, and the question of how we might ascribe dignity to lives after they have ended.