Denver Newsroom, Nov 14, 2021 / 12:00 pm
Famed ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre called upon academia and other Catholics and intellectuals to invest in the “expensive conversation” about justice, and to sharpen their understanding of what constitutes human dignity.
MacIntyre, whose teaching career spans 70 years and includes some of the most important books on virtue ethics such as "After Virtue" and "Dependent Rational Animal," gave a reflection entitled “Human Dignity: A Puzzling and Possibly Dangerous Idea?” at the University of Notre Dame’s de Nicola Fall Conference Nov. 12.
During the presentation, he argued that the modern term “human dignity” is doing the work that justice should be doing and that the current definition of human dignity and its implications have puzzling limitations.
He posed the question of whether or not Hitler has human dignity— and if he does, what is he afforded by it? Can human dignity never be lost, MacIntyre asked.