First Steps
Our first task is to elucidate and distinguish two conception of human dignity—‘human dignity as empowerment’ and ‘human dignity as constraint’. This distinction correlates broadly with the contrast between the background role typically assigned to human dignity in the founding international instruments of human rights as against the foreground role assigned to it in the recent instruments that set the framework for modern bioscience. Where human dignity plays a background role, the governing conception is human dignity as empowerment; Where it plays a foreground role, the distinctive conception is human dignity as constraint.