Dignity in Judgement between Religious and Secular Thinking
Andrea Pin

This text draws on the new book by Andrea Pin, Dignity in Judgment: Constitutional Adjudication in Comparative Perspective (Oxford University Press 2025). Editorial Note: Page numbers in the text refer to the prior publication linked in the text.

The concept of human dignity has become a staple in legal studies, political philosophy, and political and moral theology. It is now a powerful term in constitutional and statutory texts, judicial decisions, academic scholarship, and even political rhetoric. It serves several roles: it may galvanize political and legal sensitiveness to a certain topic or agenda (160), express the importance of human rights or the gravest concern for their violation, capture the quintessence (194) of a legal system (386-87), flesh out a meta-theory of how legal systems should operate, and guide interpretation of legal rules. Dignity even often embodies the quest for the universal in human rights adjudication and has become a yardstick to measure the progress of legal civilization (482).

Dignity in Judgement (Oxford University Press, 2025)

Academics and practitioners have repeatedly tried to make sense of the widespread use of the notion across the world, especially within lawmaking and adjudication. Identifying what human dignity means, its scope, what it entails for adjudication and policy-making, and how to protect it has kept them busy for decades now. However, the more often the term dignity is used, the more variable and even controversial its meaning becomes. Even within a single jurisdiction, appeals to dignity now often generate controversy rather than mitigate it, as legislatures, courts, and commentators draw dramatically different legal conclusions from the concept. For example, in debates about abortion, some claim that outlawing abortion protects and ensures the dignity of the embryo or fetus, while others argue that establishing the right of the woman to terminate her pregnancy protects her dignity (765, 773). In the eyes of some, dignity even is a cheap shortcut to magnify the importance of a certain topic without further explanation (252-53), or “a Trojan horse to smuggle into moral and political practice specific views that are not generally shared” (144).

The current controversial status of dignity is paradoxical. The notion of dignity entered the canon of comparative constitutional law when it appeared in the opening article of the German Basic Law (1949): the drafters then chose it because they considered it less contentious and philosophically challenging than that of natural law or natural rights: it was an area on which different secular and religious strands of thinking overlapped and could agree upon. Such agreement has now faded away.

A Secular Dignity?

Although multiple genealogical and theoretical inquiries have reached different results in tracing the meaning or defining the edges of the concept of human dignity, many largely agree on a standard narrative that stretches back well before the twentieth century. Most scholars (32) seem to be of the view (76-78) that the concept of human dignity gradually moved from the original Roman idea of a person with high status, honor, or “ranking,” to the modern idea of dignity as a universal and essential claim (241-42) of all human beings. Christianity supported this idea (147) by rooting the concept of human dignity in the teaching that all human beings are created in the image of God, which Thomas Aquinas especially developed (242) and was later featured prominently in the Spanish debates (102) about the treatment of native peoples in Central and South America. This predominantly Christian framework survived the Protestant Reformation and the consequent fragmentation of Christendom in Europe. Martin Luther’s argument (101-103) that the human dignity corrupted by sin had been restored through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ was very much in keeping with the earlier Christian tradition and informed his idea of Christian freedom. But Renaissance humanists such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, especially through his influential Oratio de hominis dignitate (1486), and Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophers gradually excised the theological dimension from dignity. They developed a purely philosophical, atheological, concept of dignity, which slowly coalesced around the concepts of free will and rationality and still dominates contemporary thought (19, 60). Revolutionary and republican thinkers further corroborated these developments, popularizing the notion of dignity, sometimes shifting its focus (245) on the need to ensure a sufficient standard of living for everyone, or giving it more of a communitarian turn (660) in regions such as Latin America (300). Only the ruminations of Personalist philosophers of the late nineteenth century resurrected the religious component (69) of dignity, which slowly became an important part (123-24) of the Catholic social doctrine and pinnacled in the twentieth century’s several papal statements about the dignity of human beings.

Of all sources, Immanuel Kant’s two famous maxims—no one should be treated merely as a means of human ends; human beings have a unique value because of their autonomy and self-determination—persist as the two main points of reference for any speculation on human dignity and often function as compasses for most inquiries and uses of the notion (55-68). A purely individualized and rational, nonreligious, and freedom-oriented notion of dignity centered on human autonomy and inspired by Kant tends to be the standard understanding of dignity—the type of dignity that can apply to all human beings regardless of where, when, how, and which type of life they live (19). This reading assumes that there is a clear gap between Christian and post-Christian thinking about dignity (499), implicitly rules out the possibility that Kant’s Protestant religiosity may have influenced his theorization of the notion (193), and sees the repudiation of Christianity and its understanding of dignity as a necessary step toward higher levels of civilization (64, 138). This narrative has been so successful that competing views inevitably need to confront and dismantle this narrative of dignity if they aim to persuade others.

Beyond the Standard Narrative about Dignity: Five Jurisdictions Compared

Challenging this narrative is the main reason for which I wrote a book. The understanding of dignity as a purely and peaceably secularized notion that courts operationalize through their rulings can be challenged on theoretical or practical terms. I take the practical approach, looking at constitutional litigation in five heterogeneous settings to assess whether, to what extent, and at which cost dignity has become secularized in practice.

The book focuses on the case law of the apex courts of Canada, Colombia, Egypt, the EU, and Israel. Each of these jurisdictions developed within or in a special relationship with an Abrahamic religion in which the deity provides a fundamental moral and normative framework. All jurisdictions display a significant level of legal hybridization and have been influenced by Christian and post-Christian legal and philosophical thinking, although Egypt and Israel have been mainly characterized by Islamic and Jewish legal traditions, which are still officially part of the law of the land.

Although dignity does not play a central role in the constitutional texts of Canada, its Supreme Court has focused on the notion in a wide array of cases, often drawing on the global narrative of rights. This has not made the notion particularly precise, however: the multicultural outlook of the country has often taken the court in different directions, making the jurisprudence on dignity inconsistent. The dual French and British legacy in particular is reflected in the jurisprudence on dignity, as continental European thinking surfaces in the Supreme Court rulings alongside that of predominantly common-law philosophers. However, the variability of the meaning of dignity in its jurisprudence seems to have made the court increasingly aware of the limits of the notion as a compass for adjudicating cases. In fact, dignity has rarely carried the day alone in the Supreme Court’s rulings. A consensus on the meaning of human dignity has developed around only a limited series of controversies, such as those about the extradition of individuals facing the death penalty abroad. Overall, the court seems to have become increasingly skeptical about the legal implications of the concept of dignity, preferring to ground its rulings on more precise and less lofty constitutional precepts.

However, here and there, dignity has been of pivotal importance in adjudication, even forcing the Canadian Supreme Court to revise its precedent. The most visible example of this phenomenon is assisted suicide, a field in which the court has contrasted the religious and nonreligious readings of dignity with shifting results. The court first upheld the prohibition of assisted suicide but struck it down later. When it upheld the ban, it did so in the name of dignity—a notion that, according to the court’s reasoning, was however quintessentially secular, to the extent that, when perusing its historical development, it omitted any Christian source (596-97). When the court reversed the ruling and allowed assisted suicide, it decided to divorce dignity from “sanctity” (298). Sanctity, the court explained, implicitly echoing Christian culture, conveyed the belief in the inviolability of human life, regardless of the specific circumstances that an individual had to endure; on the contrary, dignity captured the right of the individual to decide for herself what to do with her life and when to terminate it. In other words, the court overruled itself by emphasizing that its precedent had mistakenly understood dignity as inviolability, which it now labeled as sanctity. Although it couched its reasoning in secular terms, the court considered that its earlier case law reflected deeply held Christian beliefs on the meaning of life, and therefore had to yield to an understanding of dignity based on an explicitly a religious, autonomy-centered understanding of the notion.

Despite the coexistence of different understandings of dignity, the case law of the Supreme Court of Canada seems to have embraced a secularized understanding of the notion. In its most recent instances, dignity is predominantly seen as an autonomy-enabling constitutional device. This approach reflects the narratives developed by many theorists of dignity cited by the court, among them Ronald Dworkin, who stands out as the most important point of reference (239) and seems to have influenced the court‘s approach more broadly with his encouragement to compartmentalize the spheres (342, 377) of religion, morality, and political institutions.

The Constitutional Court of Colombia reads human dignity in light of the long and painful history of foreign colonization and underdevelopment of Latin America, blending it with prominent contemporary theorists of law and rights such as Dworkin and Isaiah Berlin. Colombia’s Constitutional Court has explicitly embraced a progressive and even creative pattern of interpretation to stimulate institutional and social development in light of centuries-long unbalances of power and social strife. Within its activity, the court has repeatedly used and even magnified the concept of human dignity, although it has hardly given it a dispositive value.

Through the notion of dignity, the court has centered its judicial agenda on strong and effective social rights, the institutional and political recognition of indigenous peoples, and the reconciliation between the military and the revolutionary groups that ran havoc in large parts of the country. This agenda has mainly promoted (344-47) a holistic and even collective understanding of human dignity that echoes the Catholic, personalist, and relational framework—although later rulings in fields such as bioethics have challenged and incrementally reframed the notion in accordance with the paradigm of autonomy and self-determination.¹ The holistic and relational reading of dignity that largely descends from the prevailing religious tradition and the individualist, autonomy-centered understanding of dignity have both operated as engines of legal and political change, albeit on different fronts: The former has emphasized social emancipation and peacemaking, while the latter has prioritized individual rights and self-fulfillment.

Overall, the opinions of the judges on the Constitutional Court of Colombia suggest the coexistence of different views on dignity and its sources. Although minoritarian, the voices conveying a religiously laden understanding of dignity have not totally subsided. The intellectual and judicial conflict between a secularized, atomistic concept of dignity and a more relational, holistic, and Christian understanding of it is still ongoing.

The Egyptian constitutional framework testifies to the rise of dignity-based adjudication and its ambivalent relationship with the role of Islamic law within the Arab context (75). Thanks to the developments in international human rights law, dignity appeared also in the constitutional texts of the region to convey the intrinsic value of the individual, stimulating similar developments in the language of rights. After the Arab Spring, the idea of human dignity has found a stronger resonance within the constitutions of the states of North Africa and the Middle East. The poor treatment that the citizens suffered under the authoritarian regimes, the collapse of national economies, and the collective strife for global recognition have re-energized the role of human dignity within the region. Meanwhile, in the post-Arab Spring scenario, constitutional clauses requiring the compliance with Islamic law have also mushroomed, giving birth to a legal environment within which courts are now called to adjudicate issues of human dignity while respecting Islamic law.

As the Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt only issues one opinion per case, which usually reflects the consensus of the judges rather than their individual preferences, the possibility of exploring the specific intellectual sources that informed their view is limited. However, there is little doubt that the overwhelmingly secular and West-leaning education of the judiciary has dominated the approach of the Supreme Constitutional Court to adjudication, at least within the framework of dignity. The court’s rulings have strong resonance with judgments issued by Western courts while they often overlook Islamic sources. Despite the constitutional provision that places Islamic law at the top of the legal system that has been in force for several decades and the growing cultural pressure that calls for its respect, Islamic legal culture rarely surfaces in dignity-based adjudication in the Egyptian court, and, when it does, it often consists of references to lofty principles and moral commands rather than sharp and easily identifiable legal precepts in Islamic jurisprudence. Through this approach, the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court clearly aims to integrate Egypt into the ranks of global—and mainly Western—constitutional standards rather than developing a tradition that authentically blends Islamic culture with the trends of legal globalization. Instead of balancing local laws with universal principles through the prism of human dignity, the court tends to use the latter to instill universal values in the Egyptian legal system while paying lip service to Islamic sources.

The two driving forces that elevated dignity in the narrative of rights, Christianity and Kant’s philosophy, have strong roots in Europe and have greatly affected EU law (144). The rise of dignity as a key constitutional notion has grown over the decades within the EU framework, but the early phases of post-World War II supranational networks that pursued prosperity and interstate partnership in strategic fields was already infused with a deep concern for the protection of human dignity. The early post-War commitment to defusing conflicts, promoting economic emancipation, and rebuilding political, legal, and industrial infrastructure already incarnated the ideal of human dignity that later featured prominently in EU’s legal texts.

The Court of Justice of the EU has increasingly paid attention to the notion of dignity, especially since the 2000 Charter of Fundamental Rights gave it a prominent place. This new framework has allowed the court to hear contentious disputes about the legal and symbolic value of the notion. However, in order to turn the lofty notion of dignity into an effective means of scrutiny, the court has trod very carefully in a culturally composite environment, avoiding unsettling the complex horizontal relationship between member states and the vertical relationship between state and EU institutions. The court has thus widely vacillated between different interpretations of the concept, even explicitly admitting—as it did in the Omega case—that its state members can legitimately differ in how they understand dignity and that the court is not in a position of ruling out one of them to replace it with another. Especially through its case law on welfare issues, the court has often espoused a thick understanding of dignity that echoes the deeply-rooted strong Christian social thinking. However, the court’s jurisprudence was quick to deflect from this approach when the financial difficulties of the member states shrank the welfare system.

Legal scholarship has justifiably reserved a great deal of attention to the jurisprudence and the academic writings of the Israeli judge and scholar Aharon Barak (177). A smaller body of knowledge has accumulated about the portion of Israeli judicial culture that has challenged Barak’s theories and legacy with arguments rooted in Jewish law and has found its champion in Menachem Elon. The overwhelming attention to Barak has often underestimated the impact of the proponents of Jewish law on the Israeli jurisprudence on dignity, which has, in fact, reflected the ambivalent nature of Israeli constitutionalism and its tension between the universal commitment to human rights and its Jewish legacy for several years.

The opposing forces that have made Israeli case law on dignity alternatively gravitate around the liberal, Western, and individualistic understanding of the concept or its Jewish interpretation of it reflect the education and the upbringing of the judges sitting on the court. In its rulings, the Supreme Court has certainly taken inspiration from the Western legal culture, with which many of its judges have been extremely familiar, bringing dignity closer to the autonomy-centered culture of rights that has often prevailed in human rights’ narratives. However, the Supreme Court has also exploited the Jewish tradition in which the Israeli legal system is rooted. Echoing the openly Jewish nature of the state and the religious training of some of the courts’ members, a plethora of citations of Jewish legal sources have sometimes even enjoyed dispositive value. At times, judges have simultaneously hybridized traditional Jewish sources with contemporary trends in constitutionalism, trying not to pit the two lines of legal thinking against each other but rather to entwine them. The balance between the religious and the secular reading of dignity has overall tilted in favor of the second, but the outlook could possibly change in the long run, also considering the entrenchment of the 2018 Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. This Basic Law has emphasized the nature of Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish population also with the goal of reframing some of fundamental constitutional notions in light of the Jewish character of the state and to counter the liberal and nonreligious understanding of dignity.

The Role of Traditions in Understanding Dignity

Each jurisdiction analyzed here has progressively developed its own style of dignity-based adjudication. The courts have differed in how they understand and use the notion: they operate in different constitutional frameworks, sometimes through widely different procedures, and draw on specific intellectual and legal traditions. They also balance their own traditions differently, and their outcomes often change with the judges who sit on the bench.

Admittedly, the scholarship on dignity has overwhelmingly treated Immanuel Kant, and especially his concept of autonomy, as the main point of reference for legal analysis. However, in the judicial use of dignity, there is more than meets the eye. Kant’s contribution has not always been the only or prevalent standard for solving dignity-based controversies (63-69). In each legal system I considered several visions of human dignity seem to exist above or beneath the surface. By magnifying the universalist Kantian approach, we might have lost other drivers of dignity-based judicial narratives that have remained in the penumbra.

Some courts use the religiously loaded notion of sanctity of life or of the human person, sometimes interchangeably with dignity, sometimes drawing distinctions between these two words, and often explaining how such wording has—or does not have—religious connotation (949). In some instances, courts have prioritized the relational, duty-centered, and collective understanding of dignity over the Kantian, autonomy-centered one that has often been translated in individualistic and rights-based terms. On several such occasions, religious thinking and religious laws have surfaced, promoting a more holistic, comprehensive, and relational understanding of dignity.

Despite the endless variability in the jurisprudence of dignity, some patterns are identifiable within each jurisdiction. What has been most important in interpreting human dignity has been the education and the environment in which the judges have been immersed. Dignity seems to be a concept that the lives of judges and their legal order at large continuously shape. To borrow from Alasdair MacIntyre, any judicial inquiry (367, 395) in dignity seems inevitably shaped by the prevailing cultural factors within which it takes place.

When it comes to interpreting the notion, legal systems behave also as systems of inquiry: those who inhabit them are imbued with a certain philosophy, which sets rationales, trends, and directions of change. In hybrid or pluralist constitutional and political settings, judges may appeal to different intellectual references. Court panels composed of several judges may generate lively conversations on how dignity should be interpreted. Such disagreements usually concern the meaning of dignity, rather than whether dignity should be utilized to decide a certain case. Clashes on dignity are not about dignity itself, but on the intellectual drivers that should guide judicial interpretation. In short, the understanding and use of dignity within a local framework depends on the collective and personal biography of those who flesh it out: in pluralist societies as those covered by this book, such biographies often diverge, and sometimes even conflict.♦

Andrea Pin (University of Padua, JD; University of Turin, PhD) is Full Professor of Comparative Law at the University of Padua and Senior Fellow in the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University, where he is also McDonald Distinguished Senior Fellow (2024-2029). Pin has taught in the United States (Emory, Notre Dame, William and Mary University), Israel (Bar Ilan and Reichman University), and Russia (Lomonosov State University of Moscow). He has authored eight books, including Dignity in Judgment: Constitutional Adjudication in Comparative Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2025), edited two volumes, and published numerous law articles.

Recommended Citation

Pin, Andrea. “Dignity in Judgment between Religious and Secular Thinking.” Canopy Forum, March 18, 2026. https://canopyforum.org/2026/03/18/dignity-in-judgment-between-religious-and-secular-thinking/.

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