Paolo Carozza on "Human Dignity and the Method of Human Experience"

The Murphy Institute was graced last week by a visit from Notre Dame Law School's Paolo Carozza (recently appointed Director of Notre Dame's Center for Civil and Human Rights), as part of our Human Dignity lecture series.  Paolo presented a talk entitled, "Human Dignity and the Method of Human Experience" in a public lecture Thursday evening, and continued the conversation the following morning in an inter-disciplinary, multi-school seminar at UST Law School.   

Paolo argued that it is time for the international community to move beyond the compromise that famously permitted the consensus leading to the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  (In Jacques Maritain's famous words:   "...we agree on the rights, but on the condition that no one asks us why.")  Drawing on his hands-on experiences 'on the ground' in international human rights work (among other things, Paolo is just coming off four years as a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the last year as its President), Paolo proposed a methodology for moving forward, toward a thicker conception of human dignity, by focusing on our common experiences of human dignity.  Paolo drew on the work of Luigi Giussani, the founder of the Communion and Liberation movement, describing a shared "elementary experience" of human dignity -- a 'complex of needs and evidences' that are more fundamental to our humanity than any time-bound, specific cultural artifacts, like law or social structures.  Paolo provided illustrations from his own experiences in the human rights field that illustrated this sort of profound, elemental encounter with the essence of humanity, bridging cultural, religious, and political divides of the community in which he was working.

You can watch the video of his excellent talk here.

In our seminarthe next day, we explored what Paolo's proposed methodology shared with, and how it differed from, some other approaches, such as natural law theory, phenomenology, Hauerwasian insights about suffering the presence of others, and the work of Karol Wojtyla.  It's clear that Paolo is developing a creative new approach to this ongoing exploration of 'human dignity' -- and that his comparative law perspective and personal experiences in human rights work contribute much to the richness of his approach.