Tanzania: In their own words: Poor women and health services.

"In Their Own Words: Poor Women And Health Services" highlights critical constraints that poor women experience in accessing health services, including the challenges they face and the strategies they use to overcome them. This summary report is meant to inform policy development and resource allocation in relation to basic services for the poor, and to mobilize the financial, human and material resources necessary to strengthen health services for women living in poverty. It is a 4 page companion piece to the longer "Poor peoples' experience of Health Services in Tanzania www.africafiles.org/article.asp?ID=7585 Women's Dignity specializes in treatment of and education on the problem of fistula in women when delivering a child

Humane Dignity

The ethics of care has developed as a movement of allied thinkers, in different continents, who have a shared concern and who reflect on similar topics. This shared concern is that care can only be revalued and take its societal place if existing asymmetrical power relations are unveiled, and if the dignity of care givers and care receivers is better guaranteed, socially, politically and personally. In this first volume of a new series leading care ethicists from Europe and the United States focus on the moral significance of two concepts in the debate that ask for further reflection. In discussion with the work of Axel Honneth on recognition and the work of Emmanuel Housset on compassion a contribution is made to a reconsideration of recognition and compassion from an ethics of care perspective

Lawyers as Upholders of Human Dignity (When They Aren\u27t Busy Assaulting It)

David Luban argues in this lecture that the moral foundation of the lawyer\u27s profession lies in the defense of human dignity-and the chief moral danger facing the profession arises when lawyers assault human dignity rather than defend it. The concept of human dignity has a rich philosophical tradition, with some philosophers identifying human dignity as a metaphysical property of individuals-a property such as having a soul, or possessing autonomy. Luban argues instead that human dignity is a relational property of the dignifier and the dignified, emphasizing that assaulting human dignity humiliates the victim. Lawyers honor the human dignity of others by protecting them against humiliations, and defile that dignity by subjecting them to humiliations. The lecture develops these ideas through four traditional issues in legal ethics: the right of criminal defendants to an advocate, the duty of confidentiality, paternalism of attorneys toward their clients, and pro bono service

"Reconsidering Dignity Relationally"

I reconsider the concept of dignity in several ways in this article. My primary aim is to move dignity in a more relational direction, drawing on care ethics to do so. After analyzing the power and perils of dignity and tracing its rhetorical, academic, and historical influence, I discuss three interventions that care ethics can make into the dignity discourse. The first intervention involves an understanding of the ways in which care can be dignifying. The second intervention examines whether the capacity to care should be considered a distinguishing moral power – as rationality often is – in light of which humans have dignity. In the third intervention, I cast dignity as a fundamentally relational concept and argue that relationality is constitutive not only of dignity but also of the wider enterprise of normativity. I understand relationality as the condition of connection in which all human beings stand with some other human beings. A thought experiment involving the last person on earth helps to reframe the normative significance of human relatedness. Dignity emerges as fundamentally grounded in relationality

Human Dignity, Humiliation, and Torture

Modern human rights instruments ground human rights in the concept of human dignity, without providing an underlying theory of human dignity. This paper examines the central importance of human dignity, understood as not humiliating people, in traditional Jewish ethics. It employs this conception of human dignity to examine and criticize U.S. use of humiliation tactics and torture in the interrogation of terrorism suspects

Dignity in and at work : why it matters

Throughout the history of social science, dignity is a word that is continually used to express concern about various aspects of work. Within these concerns we see a set of implicit understandings of what dignity is, and what it does, and profoundly, dignity as an essential need of the human spirit. Beginning with some of the earliest insights that inform contemporary analyses of work we can see that, in different ways and relating their concerns to different eras, writers on work and organisation each conceptualise increasing industrialisation as entailing a possible denial of dignity. Most recently the dignity at work debate been colonised by the focus on bullying and harassment. The high profile campaign for 'dignity at work' (cf: Amicus and The Andrea Adams Trust) draws attention to the everyday bullying behaviours that occur in the workplace serving to intimidate and oppress employees, coming both from the workplace hierarchy, and, whether through cultural consensus or individual malintent, from peers. This reflects a feeling that some fundamental rights are coming under pressure. The proposed UK 'dignity at work act' advises that 'every employee shall have the right to dignity at work'

Dignity and the Phenomenology of Recognition-Respect

What is dignity? My starting point is that dignity is one of those philosophical primitives that admit of no informative analysis. Nonetheless, I suggest, dignity might yield to indirect illumination when we consider the kind of experience we have (or rather find it fitting to have) in its presence. This experience, I claim, is what is sometimes known as recognition-respect. Through an examination of a neglected aspect of the phenomenology of recognition-respect, I argue that the possession of inner consciousness is a precondition for the possession of dignity. The reason for this, I suggest, is that the ultimate privacy of the contents of our consciousness grounds a kind of inviolability characteristic of dignity

Dignity and Assisted Dying: What Kant Got Right (and Wrong)

That Kant’s moral thought is invoked by both advocates and opponents of a right to assisted dying attests to both the allure and and the elusiveness of Kant’s moral thought. In particular, the theses that individuals have a right to a ‘death with dignity’ and that assisting someone to die contravenes her dignity appear to gesture at one of Kant’s signature moral notions, dignity. The purposes of this article are to outline Kant’s understanding of dignity and its implications for the ethics of assisted dying. According to Kant, that which has dignity must be treated as an end in itself and may not permissibly be exchanged for that which merely has price. Kant’s reasoning thus seems to preclude acts of self-killing, including voluntary assisted dying, that rest on individual self-interest, since a person’s interests merely have price. However, a recognizably Kantian view of dignity can permit assisted dying under two sets of circumstances: First, it can be permissible for agents who anticipate a degradation of their rational agency due to conditions such as dementia to direct others to end their lives once sufficiently demented. In so doing, such agents in effect exercise a right to impose obligations on others regarding how their bodies, which will at some future point no longer be the vessels of their rational agency, are to be disposed of. Second, Kant errs in supposing that our dignity can stem solely from our moral personality, i.e., from our capacity to abide by universalizable moral principles. Rather, complete dignity also requires the capacity for setting discretionary ends and the means to those ends, i.e., the dignity of humanity. Individuals with prolonged and intense depression, in severe pain, or with serious disability may lack humanity while retaining their moral personality. In such cases, I propose that their opting to end their lives, with or without the assistance of others, does not amount to exchanging their dignified selves for something which merely has price and is therefore not objectionable on Kantian grounds