Writers on human dignity roughly divide between those who stress the social origins of this concept and its role in marking rank and hierarchy, and those who follow Kant in grounding dignity in an abstract and idealized philosophical conception of human beings. In these lectures, Jeremy Waldron contrives to combine attractive features of both strands. In the first lecture, Waldron presents a conception of dignity that preserves its ancient association with rank and station, thus allowing him to tap rich historical resources while avoiding what many perceive as the excessive abstraction and dubious metaphysics of the Kantian strand. At the same time he argues for a conception of human dignity that amounts to a generalization of high status across all human beings, and so attains the appealing universality of the Kantian position. The second lecture focuses particularly on the importance of dignity - understood in this way - as a status defining persons' relation to law: their presentation as persons capable of self-applying the law, capable of presenting and arguing a point of view, and capable of responding to law's demands without brute coercion. Together the two lectures illuminate the relation between dignity conceived as the ground of rights and dignity conceived as the content of rights; they also illuminate important ideas about dignity as noble bearing and dignity as the subject of a right against degrading treatment; and they help us understand the sense in which dignity is better conceived as a status than as a kind of value.

Normative Subjects alludes to the fields of morality and law, as well as to the entities, self and collectivity, addressed by these clusters of norms. The book explores connections between the two. The conception of self that informs this book is the joint product of two multifaceted philosophical strands, the constructivist and the hermeneutical. Various schools of thought view human beings as self creating: by pursuing our goals and promoting our projects, and so while abiding by the various norms that guide us in these endeavors, we also determine human identity. The result is an emphasis on a reciprocal relationship between law and morality on the one side and the composition and boundaries of the self on the other. In what medium does this self creation take place, and who exactly is the "we" engaged in it? The answer suggested by the hermeneutical tradition provides the book with its second main theme. Like plays and novels, human beings are constituted by meaning, and these meanings vary in their level of abstraction. Self creation is a matter of fixing and elaborating these meanings at different levels of abstraction: the individual, the collective, and the universal. A key implication of this picture, explored in the book, is a conception of human dignity as accruing to us qua authors of the values and norms by which we define our selves individually and collectively.

Normative Subjects alludes to the fields of morality and law, as well as to the entities, self and collectivity, addressed by these clusters of norms. The book explores connections between the two. The conception of self that informs this book is the joint product of two multifaceted philosophical strands, the constructivist and the hermeneutical. Various schools of thought view human beings as self creating: by pursuing our goals and promoting our projects, and so while abiding by the various norms that guide us in these endeavors, we also determine human identity. The result is an emphasis on a reciprocal relationship between law and morality on the one side and the composition and boundaries of the self on the other. In what medium does this self creation take place, and who exactly is the "we " engaged in it? The answer suggested by the hermeneutical tradition provides the book with its second main theme. Like plays and novels, human beings are constituted by meaning, and these meanings vary in their level of abstraction. Self creation is a matter of fixing and elaborating these meanings at different levels of abstraction: the individual, the collective, and the universal. A key implication of this picture, explored in the book, is a conception of human dignity as accruing to us qua authors of the values and norms by which we define our selves individually and collectively.

In these writings by one of our most creative legal philosophers, Meir Dan-Cohen explores the nature of the self and its response to legal commands and mounts a challenge to some prevailing tenets of legal theory and the neighboring moral, political, and economic thought. The result is an insider's critique of liberalism that extends contemporary liberalism's Kantian strand, combining it with postmodernist ideas about the contingent and socially constructed self to build a thoroughly original perspective on some of the most vital concerns of legal and moral theory.

Dan-Cohen looks first at the ubiquity of legal coercion and considers its decisive impact on the nature of legal discourse and communication, on law's normative aspirations and claim to obedience, and on the ideal of the rule of law. He moves on to discuss basic values, stressing the preeminence of individual identity and human dignity over the more traditional liberal preoccupations with preference-based choice and experiential harm. Dan-Cohen then focuses more directly on the normative ramifications of the socially constructed self. Fundamental concepts such as responsibility and ownership are reinterpreted to take account of the constitutive role that social practices--particularly law and morality--play in the formation of the self.

Throughout, Dan-Cohen draws on a uniquely productive mix of philosophical traditions and subjects, blending the methods of analytic philosophy with the concerns of Continental philosophers to reconceive the self and its relation to ethics and the law.

Writers on human dignity roughly divide between those who stress the social origins of this concept and its role in marking rank and hierarchy, and those who follow Kant in grounding dignity in an abstract and idealized philosophical conception of human beings. In these lectures, Jeremy Waldron contrives to combine attractive features of both strands. In the first lecture, Waldron presents a conception of dignity that preserves its ancient association with rank and station, thus allowing him to tap rich historical resources while avoiding what many perceive as the excessive abstraction and dubious metaphysics of the Kantian strand. At the same time he argues for a conception of human dignity that amounts to a generalization of high status across all human beings, and so attains the appealing universality of the Kantian position. The second lecture focuses particularly on the importance of dignity - understood in this way - as a status defining persons' relation to law: their presentation as persons capable of self-applying the law, capable of presenting and arguing a point of view, and capable of responding to law's demands without brute coercion. Together the two lectures illuminate the relation between dignity conceived as the ground of rights and dignity conceived as the content of rights; they also illuminate important ideas about dignity as noble bearing and dignity as the subject of a right against degrading treatment; and they help us understand the sense in which dignity is better conceived as a status than as a kind of value.