Human Dignity and Human Being

The question of human dignity is surely inseparable from the question of what it is to be human. This seems to be most obviously so inasmuch as the concept of human dignity is closely related to the idea of human worth—to attend to human dignity is to attend to the value or significance that belongs to human being (this alone is a reason why the concept of human dignity cannot be discarded), but to attend to this is already to presuppose an understanding of the nature of human being, of what human being is. Yet few discussions of human dignity make this connection a focus for discussion in itself—rather than probe the question of human dignity as a question about human being, the question is treated in a way that often seems to imply a severance from such ‘ontological’ concerns.