Legal Personality and Man’s Right to Life and Human Dignity in Contemporary Catholic Natural Law Philosophy

Abstract

At the drafting time of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it seemed neither possible, nor necessary to establish a philosophical anthropological definition of the human person whose rights were proclaimed by the Declaration. Nowadays, this is, however, inevitable because neither human legal personality, nor the most fundamental and real human rights could be proclaimed, established, or enforced without it. For nowadays, when the intellectual milieu is governed by prevalent libertarian and value relativist ideas, these rights are, mostly due to the lack of their conceptual basis, often turned against the person himself, his right to legal personality, life and human dignity. The Catholic natural law tradition has, on the other hand, always proved to be an effective aid in this process, when, through his rights, the
human person is to be protected in ever new bioethical situations.