Dignity as humanness: a pathway to understand the place of dignity as a constitutional end

Abstract The work presents an approach to the meaning(s) of dignity in the constitutional field that focuses, first and foremost, on answering the question: what is dignity? Four ways of characterising the notion are described, relying, where relevant, on the input obtained beyond the legal field – especially in that of philosophy. Although each of them accounts for a different kind of human property, an important commonality among them is stressed, which provides a pathway to understand the place of dignity as a constitutional end within a material approach to constitutions.