Democracy and Human Dignity: Limits of a Moralized Conception of Rights in German Constitutional Law

Abstract

The Parliamentary Council, the constitutional assembly for the German Basic Law, split over the question whether the guarantee of human dignity should be understood as the result of a democratic decision or as the incorporation of a pre-existing universal principle of Christian origin. The subsequent constitutional practice was dominated by a moral understanding of the norm that stressed the contradiction between democracy and human dignity. This Article rejects this interpretation and attempts to show, using the exemplary German case, that a democracy-oriented interpretation of human dignity is not necessarily less effective than a moralized understanding.