Preserving Human Dignity
The rapid developments in the natural sciences, medicine and society have created the need to come up with legal regulations for specific bioethical conflicts. If corresponding decisions are not to be made purely on the basis of majority viewpoints and reasons of opportunity, but rather to reflect the moral convictions of the respective pluralistic society in a certain way, the search for a common link between the different ideological basic convictions becomes urgent.
In 1945 the international community became aware of the full extent of the racially motivated National Socialist crimes against people of Jewish faith and origin: the murder of millions. How inhumanly the National Socialists treated people of Slavic origin is illustrated by a statement by Himmler of October 4, 1943, which is documented in the Flossenbürg concentration camp.
What good blood of our kind is present in the people, we will get by stealing their children, if necessary, and bringing them with them raise us. Whether the other peoples live in prosperity or whether they perish from hunger, that interests only as far as we need them as slaves for our culture.
These atrocities were based on two National Socialist principles, You are nothing, your people are everything. The Aryan race is particularly precious, other races are inferior or should even be destroyed.
Therefore the Charter of the United Nations, the Human Rights Declaration of the United Nations and the Federal German Basic Law negated these two principles propagated by National Socialism and positively replaced them with the principle of human dignity. In the words of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, "All people are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should encounter one another in a spirit of brotherhood."
The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in particular turns article by article against the cruel human rights violations of the National Socialists, to which more than 20 million people fell victim. Against this background, the principle of human dignity can be understood as a contradiction to the two National Socialist principles.
The principle of human dignity is the principle of the fundamental equality of all people, according to which every person owes every person to recognize them as equals. This equality applies regardless of race, gender, origin, skin color, religious or ideological beliefs and performance.
This means that the principle of human dignity and the human rights associated with it must also be distinguished from the principles of what is known as a Marxian humanism. In contrast to National Socialism, Marxism and the real existing socialism in its tradition preserved the basic principle of equality for all people. But the first principle was replaced by the contrary principle, "You are nothing, the party is everything", analogous to National Socialism.
An ethics based on the principle of human dignity differs fundamentally from classical utilitarianism. This negates the first principle, since the individual can be sacrificed to the greatest possible number for happiness. But it also relativizes the second principle of the fundamental equality of all people, insofar as, for example, in preferential utilitarianism only the same preferences are counted as equal. That is why a person with severe intellectual disabilities no longer counts as equals, because they cannot develop the same preferences as a normal person, perhaps not even like a healthy dog.
