Man In His Original Dignity

This title was first published in 2001. This work explores the professional standards of the French bar as it moves, rapidly but with misgivings, into a world of competition, organization and globalism. It focuses on the ideology of French legal ethics in its historical and social contexts, rather than the details of the rules governing avocats. Those rules are technical and, in many respects, similar to the rules in effect in the USA. But lawyers in France and the United States base their rules on strikingly different pictures of lawyers. French avocats classify their duties as a series of virtues - probity, honour and delicacy - to follow one official formulation. By contrast, lawyers in the USA, to judge from the way they justify their rules, consider their fellows scoundrels who, without regulation, would cheat their clients, opposing parties and other lawyers. The author's goal is to describe, in their cultural and institutional contexts, the professional ideals of the French bar as it remembers its past and faces its future.

In everything from philosophical ethics to legal argument to public activism, it has become commonplace to appeal to the idea of human dignity. In such contexts, the concept of dignity typically signifies something like the fundamental moral status belonging to all humans. Remarkably, however, it is only in the last century that this meaning of the term has become standardized. Before this, dignity was instead a concept associated with social status. Unfortunately, this transformation remains something of a mystery in existing scholarship. Exactly when and why did "dignity" change its meaning? And before this change, was it truly the case that we lacked a conception of human worth akin to the one that "dignity" now represents? In this volume, leading scholars across a range of disciplines attempt to answer such questions by clarifying the presently murky history of "dignity," from classical Greek thought through the Middle Ages and Enlightenment to the present day.

An ardent treatise for the Dignity of Man, which elevates Humanism to a truly Christian level, making this writing as pertinent today as it was in the Fifteenth Century.

Misunderstandings about what it means for humans to be created in God's image have wreaked devastation throughout history -- for example, slavery in the U. S., genocide in Nazi Germany, and the demeaning of women everywhere. In Dignity and Destiny John Kilner explores what the Bible itself teaches about humanity being in God's image. He discusses in detail all of the biblical references to the image of God, interacts extensively with other work on the topic, and documents how misunderstandings of it have been so problematic. People made according to God's image, Kilner says, have a special connection with God and are intended to be a meaningful reflection of him. Because of sin, they don't actually reflect him very well, but Kilner shows why the popular idea that sin has damaged the image of God is mistaken. He also clarifies the biblical difference between being God's image (which Christ is) and being in God's image (which humans are). He explains how humanity's creation and renewal in God's image are central, respectively, to human dignity and destiny. Locating Christ at the center of what God's image means, Kilner charts a constructive way forward and reflects on the tremendously liberating impact that a sound understanding of the image of God can have in the world today.

This book is concerned with the exploration of the concept of human dignity. This concept is taken as the ultimate basis of the entitlement of man to his special position in the interhuman context and also as what can be described as the metaphysical orbit. The thesis of the book is that the concept is eclectic, so that it is mandatory to explore its various components, analyzed here: man and morality and eventually the attribution of sancity to human life as such. The method pursued explores these various aspects by analyzing the most prominent expressions of the various views of philosophers, and adding critical comments to the analysis.