ABSTRACT
The evangelical theologians stuck to their argument about God’s gift of human life and soon retreated to their beloved topics of abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research, body parts harvesting and the like. Cicero started the move towards a conception of dignity that refers to the inner life by contrasting dignitas with voluptas – desire. Stoicism and Neo-Platonism prepared therefore the adoption of dignitas by Christian theology. The psychologist Steven Pinker repeated the attack in more measured terms in the early twenty-first century: ‘“dignity” is a squishy, subjective notion, hardly up to the heavyweight moral demands assigned to it’. The Christian provenance and the double anthropology dignity carry nevertheless survived. The idea of dignity replaces that of the person, as the contemporary heir to claims about the sacredness of life. It offers something more abstract, vague and less soiled by wars that kill humans in order to save humanity.
