Philosophy of Human Dignity and the Ethics of Psychiatry

Current moral philosophy has serious problems with the concept of human dignity. Although it seems to be an almost inevitable ingredient of every day moral judgments, philosophers have difficulties to find an analysis of the concept that could support this central role. One way out of these difficulties consists in a closer look at the various areas where the concept is used so widely and naturally, in the attempt to extract inductively an adequate understanding of human dignity from these contexts. In the article, this strategy is used to glean features of human dignity from the history of psychiatry, condense them into a plausible understanding of human dignity and finally sketch some practical implications for modern psychiatric ethics.