The Constitutional Meaning Of "Human Dignity"

As an important value generally recognized by the international community,human dignity plays an important role in the International Bill of Human Rights and the constitutions of various countries.The important reason is that dignity provides a universal value choice,and its concept and meaning have been recognized by many parties.But in fact,constitutional dignity faces many difficulties in understanding and applying,which is mainly manifested in the misunderstanding of the constitutional meaning of dignity,and this misunderstanding mainly comes from the vagueness and emptiness of the concept of dignity itself.Because of this,human dignity has been expanded in judicial practice and used to appeal to emerging constitutional rights.On the one hand,dignity in the law is too abstract and has no judicial applicability.Both sides of the debate can find strong defenses through the dignity clause,which essentially does not provide a basis for a judge’s decision,but rather blurs the line between right and wrong.In the trial of some cases,human dignity can arbitrarily make up for the lack of legislation and become a principle in arbitrary legal relationships,and even directly become the basis for judges to decide.To a certain extent,human dignity hinders the judicial process.On the other hand,people expect that the purpose of expanding rights and freedoms can be achieved by invoking human dignity in the constitution.Such an approach brings the threat of disorderly expansion of rights.Human rights derived from human dignity seem to have natural justice.It introduces morality into legal judgment and entails the value of freedom and equality,making the concept of dignity more complicated.For this reason,the fierce conflict and contradiction have led to the questioning of dignity in theory and practice.Constitutional "dignity" needs to have a clear legal meaning in order to play an accurate role in the normative sense.At present,there are two ways to understand dignity.One is the philosophical path based on the view of traditional human rights in natural law.It forms a justice system in which human rights exist independently of political positive law.With the rise of the new naturalist school of law,this way of understanding is still recognized by a large number of scholars.The philosophical approach focuses more on individualism and moral obligations,but ignores the legal relationship of "human dignity" in the constitution.Therefore,it will exacerbate the ambiguity of the concept of dignity and is not conducive to the constitutional development of the concept of dignity.Although the emerging political concept does not deny the value of human dignity,it obviously pays more attention to the practical process of human dignity in reality,tends to regard human rights as a response to political practice,and emphasizes the functional perspective of human rights.The political understanding path of dignity can make up for the problem of insufficient explanation of the philosophical understanding path,is more conducive to the protection of human rights,and is more inclusive of the multicultural and social backgrounds of various countries.Therefore,the constitutional "human dignity" is more realistic as a constitutional clause carrying political functions.However,the concept of political human rights also has some flaws,which are reflected in its history of over-focusing on human rights practice,which in fact took place in a philosophical path.Moreover,the concept of political human rights also does not point out the normative path of dignity in detail,nor does it form a complete dictionary meaning of human dignity and actually apply it to judicial practice.On the premise of basically agreeing with the concept of political human rights,this paper proposes a paradigm for understanding identity dignity,which corrects the flaws of the concept of political human rights.There are identity differences between individuals,and dignity can also be regarded as a right derived from identity.The advantage of this view is that it can make dignity concrete and have more normative significance.At the same time,human identity can be divided into two types: social identity and legal identity.In the constitution,"human dignity" can be regarded as the rights acquired by citizens based on constitutional identity,which is conducive to improving the legal meaning of dignity,especially the constitutional meaning of dignity.In this way,the subject of rights and obligations of dignity can be clarified.The subject of obligations is the public power of the state,and the content of obligations is the negative obligation to protect human dignity.Therefore,the main function of constitutional dignity is that it is a right of defense.Such a view of identity dignity is conducive to resolving the conflict between dignity and fundamental rights,responding to the relationship between constitutional and departmental law dignity,and responding to the challenges of emerging rights.