Contents
I. Introduction
Part I. Preliminary debates: the relations between human rights and political practice, feasibility, and power
2. Humanist and political perspectives on human rights
3. The feasibility of human rights
4. Human rights and power
Part II. The dignitarian approach
5. Understanding human dignity in human rights
6. Defending the significance of human dignity
7. Dignity and solidaristic empowerment
8. The dignitarian approach as a program
Part III. Implications of the dignitarian approach
9. Labor rights
10. Political rights
11. Minimalist versus expansive views of human rights dignity

This book offers a sophisticated and comprehensive defence of the view that human dignity is the moral heart of human rights. First, it clarifies the network of concepts associated with dignity. Paramount within this network is a core notion of human dignity as an inherent, non-instrumental,
egalitarian, and high-priority normative status of human persons. People have this status in virtue of their valuable human capacities rather than as a result of their national origin and other conventional features. Second, it shows how human dignity gives rise to an inspiring ideal of solidaristic
empowerment, which calls us to support people's pursuit of a flourishing life by affirming both negative duties not to block or destroy, and positive duties to protect and facilitate, the development and exercise of the valuable capacities at the basis of their dignity. The most urgent of these
duties are correlative to human rights. Third, this book illustrates how the proposed dignitarian approach allows us to articulate the content, justification, and feasible implementation of specific human rights, including contested ones, such as the rights to democratic political participation and
to decent labour conditions. Finally, this book's dignitarian approach helps illuminate the arc of humanist justice, identifying both the difference and the continuity between the basic requirements of human rights and more expansive requirements of social justice such as those defended by liberal
egalitarians and democratic socialists.

Human dignity is indeed the moral heart of human rights. Understanding it enables us to defend human rights as the urgent ethical and political project that puts humanity first.