Constructing dignity: Human rights as a praxis of egalitarian freedom

Familiar philosophical accounts of the relationship between human rights and human dignity treat dignity as the foundation of human rights. These accounts get the historical and conceptual relationship between rights and dignity wrong and obscure how power and politics shape human dignity in practice. This article sketches an alternative view that treats the emancipatory praxis of human rights as constitutive of a distinctive conception of dignity as egalitarian freedom. This political account clarifies the historical and conceptual relationships between dignity and human rights in ways that provide powerful critical leverage on some obdurate controversies in the field. Additionally, it makes the analysis of power and struggle central to our understanding of dignity and human rights at a political moment when such an analysis proves indispensable.