Recently, however, there seems to be a renewed interest in the idea of human dignity amongphilosophers and legal scholars.Within the western liberal tradition itself, some philosophers come to treat dignity as the philosophical foundation for the existence of rights.
　　　　 A U.S. Supreme Court Justice even made effort to found the new constitutional rights on the basis of human dignity.
　　　　 The concept of dignity is also used, though implicitly, as a device to reconcile Confucianism, primarily a duty-oriented ethics, with the rights-based modern liberalism.
　　　　
　The recent rise in references to human dignity has hardly contributed to its conceptual clarity, however.The concept, which Dworkin notes rightly as broad and vague,
　　　　 has caused much confusion in literature.It has been used by authors of different convictions to stand for different meanings and with different implicit assumptions, often never made explicit and articulated.It has been employed variously to mean, among other things, the Kantian imperative of treating human being always as the end and never as means only,
　　　　 the “intrinsic humanity divested of all socially imposed roles and norms”,
　　　　 the inherent worth belonging equally to all human beings,
　　　　 the actually developed and mutually recognized moral status of a person,
　　　　 the act and the capacity of claiming one’s rights or the self-controlled expression of rights,
　　　　 the right to secure inviolable moral status against degradation and disgrace in the context of the Due Process and the Equal Protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment in the United States Constitution,
　　　　 self-respect implying respect for others as opposed to purely self-centered esteem,
　　　　 the quality or state of being worthy and esteemed which requires respect for one’s physical or psychological integrity,
　　　　 full realization of human power and rational existence,
　　　　 the existentialist “authentic dignity of man” as found in man’s thrownness into the truth of Being,
　　　　 the universally shared human reality as given by God or the unique value of human being created in the image of God,
　　　　 and the all-embracing Confucian ideal of humanity (Ren) composed of “concentric circles” of the self, the family, the state, human society, and the cosmos.
　　　　 While some of the connotations are vague and unclear in themselves (what is meant by the end as opposed to mere means?what is full realization of human power? etc.), others conflict with one another (e.g., human dignity as intrinsic quality universal to all versus extrinsic characters present only in some human beings).It is perhaps not far-fetched to say that the current discussions of human dignity are mired in the stage of conceptual chaos.

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