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AbstractComplex moral and political problems like climate change have the capacity to make wrongful (in)actions appear reasonable. This has significance for the central questions of jurisprudence. If we cannot plan rationally for the future, or acts now thought to be rational and blameless become progressively more blameworthy, central elements in our understanding of law – planning, reasonableness, and authority – may diminish in their ability to explain the function and normativity of law. If this is the case, legal positivism and legal non-positivism appear to be confronted with significant, but different, challenges depending on the extent that they conceive of law as future-orientated planning or as a form of practical reasonableness.

Drawing upon Kant's analysis of the role of intuitions in our orientation towards knowledge, this paper analyses four points of departure in thinking about dignity: self, other, time and space. Each reveals a core area of normative discourse – authenticity in the self, respect for the other, progress through time and authority as the government of space – along with related grounds of resistance to dignity. The paper concludes with a discussion of the methodological challenge presented by our different dignitarian intuitions, in particular the role of universality in testing and cohering our intuitions.

The rule of law denotes an expectation of non-arbitrary governance. It also invokes law's distinctive characteristics: formality, institutional independence, and authority. Taken together with a basic conception of the person, the rule of law can be treated as 'good governance consistent with human rationality or agency' and is often associated with human dignity. On the view defended here human dignity in conjunction with the rule of law makes additional, specific, demands on legal systems, namely the reconciliation of the 'normative holism' of law (its regulatory reach) with permissive, 'anthropological', demands. This line of enquiry provides us with both a distinctive understanding of human dignity and an understanding of law that is normative but still closely related to the formal virtues implied by the rule of law.

The rule of law denotes an expectation of non-arbitrary governance. It also invokes law's distinctive characteristics: formality, institutional independence, and authority. Taken together with a basic conception of the person, the rule of law can be treated as 'good governance consistent with human rationality or agency' and is often associated with human dignity. On the view defended here human dignity in conjunction with the rule of law makes additional, specific, demands on legal systems, namely the reconciliation of the 'normative holism' of law (its regulatory reach) with permissive, 'anthropological', demands. This line of enquiry provides us with both a distinctive understanding of human dignity and an understanding of law that is normative but still closely related to the formal virtues implied by the rule of law.