Apart from being a pervasive concept of present-day law, human dignity is a phenomenon regularly experienced by people in their lives. Yet before any protection for it can be advanced, it is imperative that an explanation of how human dignity is at all possible be established, including a description of its constitutive figures. Paul Ricoeur made a significant contribution to the lacking phenomenology of human dignity. Despite only rarely using the term dignity directly, he identified and described its three constitutive (...) and interdependent figures—self-esteem, self-respect, and recognition—and embedded them amongst such notions as self, identity, narrative, passivity, bodiliness, fragility, morality, and law. He activated the phenomenological, existentialist, and hermeneutic legacies in understanding human dignity and succeeded in modifying certain sharp-edged structures that have periodically been associated with the notion of human dignity. In this paper I argue that human dignity is a high-ranking topic in Ricoeur’s writings, identify and synthesize the phenomenology of human dignity scattered throughout his works, and reveal the profound existential aspects he attributed to it. Finally, I discuss and evaluate his phenomenological-existentialistic account of human dignity, particularly taking into consideration the contemporary use of human dignity in law and its associated discourses. (shrink)

Despite an immense amount of literature on the topic of trust, there is still no account that offers a plausible epistemological framework for the phenomenon of reasonable trust. The main claim of this article is that reasonable trust and distrust are phenomena based upon practical knowledge, while non-reasonable trust and distrust result from dislocation of trust into different epistemic regimes. This dislocation can be observed in some of the influential theories such as cognitive and emotional accounts of trust and in (...) the accounts understanding trust as a form of faith. Added to that, theoretical approaches introducing a strong idea of basic trust preclude observing the difference between reasonable and non-reasonable trust. In this article, I argue that reasonable trust is founded upon practical knowledge which includes knowledge of integrity of the trusted person and knowledge about a similarity of worldviews of the trust giver and the trust receiver. Furthermore, I elaborate on the ways reasonable trust and distrust are being transformed and disfigured in other epistemic regimes. Drawing mainly upon Aristotelian understanding of practical knowledge, I want to show how non-reasonable trust and distrust are manifested in the phenomena of blind trust, unconditional trust and absolute doubt and explain why non-reasonable trust and distrust can hardly be distinguished from loyalty, subordination, infatuation or calculation. (shrink)