Manuel Atienza, Sobre la dignidad humana [On human dignity].

This article analyzes Manuel Atienza's study on the role of human dignity in legal and moral decision-making, emphasizing its centrality in Western constitutional rights discourse. Atienza grounds dignity in Kant's moral philosophy, viewing it as a foundational yet complex concept that supports individual autonomy while requiring balancing among conflicting rights. The book explores dignity's application to bioethics, social rights, animal rights, and emerging issues like artificial intelligence, advocating for dignity as a unifying measure in practical reasoning but acknowledging its limitations in yielding definitive answers. Atienza also highlights dignity's secular, consensus-building function as a "bridge concept" across diverse moral and political perspectives, while the article critiques the book for insufficiently addressing how dignity translates into concrete legal standards and for its optimistic claim that moral reasoning can produce single right answers.