A Historical Retrospective of Human Dignity. From the Spanish Constitution to the Discovery of America

Abstract

The present article contains a retrospective analysis of the notion of human dignity. Although it emerged in the legal sphere in the first half of the last century, its content and meaning were rooted in the Kantian doctrine, and this in turn came from the notion employed by contemporary authors and even before Kant (eighteenth and seventeenth centuries), who already used the expression 'dignity of human nature'. This notion can also be seen in some authors of the Second Scholasticism such as Francisco de Vitoria, who developed this notion in the context of Spanish colonization in America.