Inherent Human Dignity

I concur in what Vince says in his post below.  Even the most depraved criminal retains his (or her) inherent human dignity.  (John Paul II emphasizes this again and again; in this, JPII and the international law of human rights speak with one voice.)  One cannot forfeit that dignity no matter what one does.  We are called to love--to treat with charity as well as with justice--even the most depraved criminal.  I cannot discern how one could agree with what Eugene Volokh says, or do what he recommends, without betraying Jesus's "new" commandment:  "You are to love one another; love one another just as I have loved you."  In my paper, The Morality of Human Rights:  A Nonreligious Ground?, in imagining a person, Sarah, who gives a religious ground for the morality of human rights, I write:

As it happens, Sarah embodies Jesus’s extravagant counsel to “love one another just as I have loved you.” She loves all human beings. Sarah loves even “the Other.”  She loves not only those for whom she has personal affection, or those with whom she works or has other dealings, or those among whom she lives; she loves even those who are most remote, who are unfamiliar, strange, or alien; those who, because they are so distant, weak, or both, will never play any concrete role, for good or ill, in Sarah’s life. (“The claims of the intimate circle are real and important enough. Yet the movement from intimacy, and to faces we do not know, still carries the ring of a certain local confinement. For there are the people as well whose faces we never encounter, but whom we have ample means of knowing about . . . . [T]heir claims too, in trouble, unheeded, are a cause for shame.”) Sarah loves even those from whom she is most estranged and towards whom she feels most antagonistic: those whose ideologies and projects and acts she judges to be not merely morally objectionable, but morally abominable. (“[T]he language of love . . . compels us to affirm that even . . . the most radical evil-doers . . . are fully our fellow human beings.”) Sarah loves even her enemies; indeed, Sarah loves even those who have violated her. Sarah is fond of quoting Graham Greene to her incredulous friends: “When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . . When you saw the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”

A hateful--hate-full--vengeance permeates what Eugene Volokh says.

Michael P.