O princípio da dignidade humana a partir da filosofia de Immanuel Kant

Abstract

This research aims at studying the principle of human dignity in the light of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. Its core purpose is to verify how this conception can contribute to a less arbitrary use of that principle in the legal field. To accomplish such a task, the problem of rational justification of human dignity will be the main focus. This is the first and necessary step to deal with other theoretical and practical issues surrounding that principle. In the first chapter, I develop a historical sketch of the idea of human dignity in Western thought, seeking to understand the logic of its philosophical development and the role it played in its emergence in legal vocabulary, especially after the Second World War. The second chapter brings a critical reflection on the need of a rational justification for human dignity, as well as on three conceptions that recurrently justify that principle in the legal contemporary discourse: the ontological, the theological and the intuitionist. In the same chapter, the development and implications of Kant's theoretical philosophy in regard to the validity and the limits of human knowledge are briefly exposed, in order to provide an epistemological basis to allow both for a systematic understanding of his thought and an analysis of those conceptions of human dignity. The third chapter is specifically focused in the examination of Kant's conception of human dignity. Here, an introduction is made to Kantian ethics. The aim is to expose and clarify its assumptions and characteristics. After that, I proceed to investigate Kant’s ethical project in the light of his own itinerary. Initially, the chapter studies the discovery and the validation of the highest principle of morality in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Then, it briefly analyzes how Kant continues his project by appealing to the fact of reason in the Critique of Practical Reason, and the relationship between that fact and freedom. Finally, I intend to explain the justification of human dignity in the autonomy of the will.