„Dennoch darf Selbsttötung nicht zum gesellschaftlichen Normalfall werden“: Menschenwürde als Norm in Argumentationen zur Sterbehilfe in Deutschland

Human dignity is a central concept in bioethical and biomedical issues and, as a norm engrained in the German Basic Law (‘Grundgesetz’), plays an important role in the assessment of potential biomedical procedures. The term can already be found in Christian-Jewish-Biblical contexts as well as in Ancient times, where different dimensions of meaning focus on the social position of humans on the one hand and the differentiation of humans from non-human beings on the other, which is justified by Cicero, among others, with the rationality of humans. The philosopher Immanuel Kant also significantly shaped the concept of human dignity in the modern era and the Enlightenment with his moral principle of the Categorical Imperative. To this day, human dignity is generally referred to in positive terms. As a semantically vague high-value word, the term human dignity is used within the analyzed plenary debates of the German Bundestag ...