Dignity, Law and Value: Enriching Sensen's Strong Priority Account

Abstract

According to Oliver Sensen’s book, Kant on Human Dignity, the notion of dignity which can be found in the Kantian corpus is fundamentally different from the notion that gains currency in politics-related contexts today, namely, dignity as a value inherent in human beings, a value that commands respect. According to Sensen, Kant’s ethics makes it impossible for a value to be the foundation of a moral requirement; instead, Kant regards value as a prescription of reason, a prescription given by the moral law. Values are normatively secondary and determined by moral laws – call this the Strong Priority Thesis (SPT) of the moral law over values. In this paper, I formulate several objections to Sensen’s SPT and I offer the Weaker Priority Thesis (WPT) as a philosophically and exegetically more compelling account of Kant’s view. The WPT interprets Kant as advancing a more complex account of the relation between moral law, values and dignity than Sensen’s SPT; moreover, I argue that, on the basis of the WPT, Kant’s account becomes sufficiently complex to incorporate also the SPT