Fundamental Rights and Human Dignity

The connection between rights and the concept of human dignity works, basic but not exclusively, in the scope of founding the rights and in the development of a theory of justice. This paper addresses the difficulties of the concept of dignity and the need to avoid seeing it as an empty formula. The connection with the Kantian autonomy is an essential reference. From there, within the framework of a secular and anthropocentric discourse, are identified some consequences that a particular understanding of the meaning of dignity for the theory of rights has currently, such as those related to animal rights, bioethics, disability rights or the concept of universality of rights.