ON THE LIMITS OF KANTIAN DIGNITY

In contemporary culture, due to a loss of transcendence and the spread of the so-called Ilume's law' (the famous is-ought problem), there is ever more propagation of the idea that morality cannot be deduced from 'on high' (metaphysics), nor from 'below' (empiric reality). The demarcation between good and bad, in other words, would be the outcome of a mere human convention. It is evident therefore that even the concept of 'dignity' appears like a type of empty and arbitrary intellectualization. Starting with Kant, in fact, the ancient invitation of the Stoics to act in conformity with the rationality-divinity of the cosmos and the successive foundation of morality based in a transcendent source were substituted with the imperative of 'autonomous' reason, of that reason which would participate, with its universal moral law, in the "kingdom of ends". The Kantian foundation of dignity, however, is very controversial in our days because the so-called 'autonomy' reveals itself as too subjective and weak, conditioned by the environment and social conventions; those who pay the consequences are the people who mostly need to be defended, the disinherited of history, that is, human beings without a face and voice.