ABSTRACT
Dieter Birnbacher’s contends that there are a number of rights (both negative and positive) that should be treated as absolute or ‘quasi-absolute’ entitlements of human beings who are ‘real subjects’, and that the importance of these rights (to ‘the provision of the biologically necessary means of existence’; to ‘freedom from strong and continued suffering’; to ‘minimal liberty’, and to ‘minimal self-respect’ – which he considers to constitute the core values associated with the concept of human dignity) is threatened by ‘inflationary’ appeals to human dignity that attribute it to ‘among others […] the early and residual stages of human life (human embryos, fetuses, and corpses), and […] to the human species.’ While human embryos, etc., do have value, ‘[t]he respect due to a human embryo or a human corpse is […] much weaker […] than that due to a human person with the capacities of consciousness and self-consciousness’, being roughly equivalent to the respect due to human organs. To conflate core and extended appeals to human dignity ‘must either lead to an unacceptably weak protection of individual and concrete dignity or to an unacceptably strong protection of generic and abstract dignity’ (Birnbacher, 1997, pp.328ff).
