A yearning for human dignity during Covid pandemic
- should be an essay about this topic
Answers
Answer
Human dignity is the same for all human beings: when I trample on the dignity of another, I am trampling on my own” – Pope Francis..
What is the intrinsic value of being a human?
Which is the guiding principle for moral values and civic virtues that we are supposed to follow? On what do human rights, bioethics and social justice discourses rest on? What do the Constitutions of nations supposedly strive to preserve? The answer common to all the questions posed above is the idea called ‘human dignity’.
Every person is worthy of honor and respect no matter who they are in this world. This is normative. But the reality is something entirely different. We live in an unjust and a stratified world. Human dignity crowns only a select few people. Not everyone is equally treated. If at all the inherent dignity of human beings was respected, vital resources, such as health and education for realising the fullest potential of the human beings, would not be unequally distributed. Not only are material resources unfairly distributed, even the honor of life is unequally assigned. It appears some lives matter less than the others.
The current pandemic has only foregrounded pre-existing social inequities and also brutally revealed the extent to which human dignity is compromised.