Unantastbare Menschenwürde

The German Federal Constitutional Court considers Article 1(1) of the country’s Basic Law to be an inalienable right. Accordingly, the impairment of human dignity cannot be justified by balancing it against other constitutional principles. Legal scholars, however, increasingly reject this understanding of the law as irrational or theoretically impossible. In this volume, Justus Quecke examines the content of these objections and the challenges associated with an absolute understanding of human dignity. He develops an alternative interpretation of human dignity, according to which the semantics of actions determine whether human dignity has been violated. In addition, he shows how ‘reasoning by example’ can operationalise an absolute understanding of Article 1(1) of the Basic Law in difficult cases.