Volti e risvolti della dignità umana. A settant’anni dall’art. 1 della Costituzione tedesca

The seventieth anniversary of the German constitution, with the famous art. 1 which proclaims the inviolability of human dignity, constitutes an opportunity to reflect on the meaning and implications of the value of dignity in the constitutional systems of the post-Auschwitz period in the light of the most relevant international conventions. The essay emphasizes that dignity, in addition to providing the basis for the universalization of legal subjectivity, plays a special role in protecting the person in situations of need or disparity where the value of dignity finds a relational and coherent specification with the principle of solidarity. Particular attention is also paid to the controversial relationship between dignity and self-determination, highlighting the need to distinguish these two values from the tendency to reduce dignity to self-determination. Dignity and self-determination should not in fact be thought of as antagonistic values, since dignity is the foundation of the person’s autonomy and therefore the source of its promotion as a value. There is in fact the risk of reversing the relationship between the two values and allowing the value of dignity to be absorbed in that of self-determination with the consequence of regressing to a discriminatory conception of the dignity and substantially dismissing it of meaning.