Abstract

This contribution investigates the logical and philosophical premises of the prevailing “static” conception of dignity, above all in the areas of prenatal human dignity, and contrasts this conception with a “dynamic” understanding of dignity. The author favours the attempt not of regarding the immanent indistinctiveness of the term “human dignity” as a problem of the legal order which necessarily ought to be eliminated, but rather of making this indistinctiveness itself useful and fertile for a “fluctuating” or fluid (i. e. because of its gradations) concept of dignity. The above-mentioned indistinctiveness of human dignity demands a decision which reminds one that it is interwoven in a field of conceptual indistinctiveness.