Abstract

In the current political discourse and in the day-by-day public debate, discussions about justice come frequently together with the word “dignity”. In some way, this second term constitutes the aim of the first one. Justice is a worthy public objective precisely because governmental actions seek for the realization of everybody´s dignity. Situations of exclusion are unacceptable because then somebody is treated as being an outsider of the human race. However, in the theoretical approaches to the issue, only a few times does justice run side by side with dignity, at least in explicit and clear terms. It’s true that words like respect or self-respect, appear frequently when the question is about the rules of fair distribution or the scope of human rights, but there is among the thinkers some kind of reluctance to use the notion of “dignity” as a central part of the foundations of social justice. John Rawls, for example, uses only three times the word in all of his classic A Theory of Justice. Probably philosophers think that the notion of human dignity introduces some essentialism in the rational argumentation, and inevitably some theological bias. At best, the introduction of the word does not improve the reasoning in any way. In this paper I affirm that there are good reasons to link philosophical foundations on justice with adequate notions of human dignity. Not for theological of metaphysical reasons, but for practical reasons. If we do not introduce the dignity dimension, our constructions about justice will remain speculative exercises. The public have good and rational arguments to bind justice with dignity.