Dignity, Descent, and the Rights to Family Life

2019

With the emergence of modern reproductive technologies, issues of kinship and family relations have returned as objects of controversial sociocultural, political and juridical debates. Current societal interest in genetics, epigenetics and DNA research indicates a trend to renaturalising kinship and subjecthood based on genetic bonds and genealogy. In various academic disciplines, this trend has been received critically. The interdisciplinary conference, organised by Inge Kroppenberg, Nikolaus Linder and Barbara Schaff (all Göttingen), brought together various researchers from the fields of anthropology, bioethics, law, political science, literature, gender and sociology to unfold the versatile facets of how Western kinship was and is negotiated. The first panel Concepts and Theories, chaired by Barbara Schaff, was opened by SUSANNE LETTOW (Berlin) who outlined historical and philosophical considerations on kinship concepts. Initiated by the transformation of family structures in th...

SSRN Electronic Journal

Their insights are reflected and their articles are cited at many points ... in the.pres essay. Most recenly, Professor Jorge Nicolis Lafferiere's article, The Challenges that Developments in Genetics and Artificial Reproduction Present to Imergenerational Solidarity (cited infra) has been the inspiration and source of several of the insights set forth herein.

The article focuses on family virtues and human dignity. Researches from the U.S. cites that the most typical representation of the family involves three criterias including heterosexuality, the presence of marriage and the children. However, the world is undergoing huge changes, causing the people to cling to some element of the old that would offer stability and support in the face of the new. The author cites on the Croatian society which underwent transformation into a capitalist society with a market economy, thus endangering the family and enabling the younger generations to search for meaning of life in other quarters. Some voices within the Catholic Church began to associate the terminology of family values with the celebrations Easter and Christmas to recover family values.

Anthropology and Aging, 2015

Human dignity is making a comeback. The paper focuses on the story that this comeback of human dignity presupposes and recasts. In that story, the “human family” is portrayed in terms of aristocratic dignitas. The consequences are twofold: 1) human dignity is co-implicated with the de-animalization of the human being; 2) once de-animalization is introduced, the story of human dignity cultivates an aristocratic sense of elevation of the human over other species, or what I will call “species aristocratism”. The fact that a new kind of aristocratism based on species emerges from the story of human dignity should concern us, I suggest, because it not only confronts us with unintended consequences of relying on human dignity as the foundation of human rights but also invites us to rethink our contemporary egalitarian, democratic ethos, understood as aristocracy for all.

2016

Abstract: The adoption of the Legal Codes has generated a debate regarding use therein of the concept of family. Today, the family is in an area of decline due to profound socio-economic mutations, which have caused several processes to become acute, such as individualization, divorce, abandonment of the prospect of marriage, increase in number of abortions, deterioration of the condition of children and adolescents. In spite of all this, the Legal Codes have preserved the traditional concepts. Likewise, the development of NRTs, insemination, surrogate mothers, demands for rights for the gay couples and their fight for acknowledgement have also contributed to this socio-cultural shift. We use the concept of family in its classical meaning; any other meaning configurations remain in the area signifying a couple/pair that do not have the possibility of procreation in themselves. Under the circumstances, we plead for the reconstruction of the family.

Ratio Juris, 2019

This paper argues that human dignity is a sui generis status principle whose function lies in unifying our normative orders. More fully, human dignity denotes a basic status to be preserved in any institution or process; it is a principle demanding determination in different contexts; and it has its most characteristic application where the legal, moral, and political place competing obligations on individuals. The implication of this account is that we should not seek to reduce human dignity to either a legal norm or a legal principle.

Biblioteca della Libertà, 2022

In this paper, I advocate the equal legal recognition of unconventional families on a liberal basis. For this purpose, I outline a functional definition of family as a multipurpose association (Struening 1999), I enumerate some of the most common and relevant purposes of family relationships, and I suggest that the function of care justifies a legitimate intervention of a liberal state in recognizing family relationships. Then I go on to argue that, if a liberal state recognizes family relationships through the law, a fundamental condition must be satisfied in order for its intervention to be legitimate. Namely, it must not violate the principle of equality between families. Consequently, it should provide equal legal treatment to family units sharing the same relevant functions and purposes, whatever their form is, and even to the ones that radically differ from the widespread idea of the traditional family.