In Defense of Human Dignity

Book excerpt: Robert Kraynak And Glenn Tinder Contend that the major challenge of our time is to recover a true and authentic understanding of human dignity and to defend it against threats from modern civilization. In Defense of Human Dignity wrestles with the dilemma that contemporary society has developed a heightened sensitivity to the demands of human dignity while creating radically new dangers to humanity in the form of the totalitarian state, modern technology, genetic engineering, the practical ethics movement, and radical environmentalism. The inspiration for this volume is the publication twenty years ago of the Covey Lectures by Glenn Tinder under the title Against Fate, in which Tinder argued that the sanctity of every individual is the central moral intuition of the Western tradition.