The aim of this assignment is to explore the significance of the concept of dignity in human life and in nursing practice. Older adults get more prone to issues related to dignity than the younger adults due to their perception of life. Nurse plays a vital role in maintaining dignity of the patient during hospital stay because it helps in promoting well being and early rehabilitation of the patient.

According to gallagher et al 2008 , dignity is related to one's identity as a person and is related to self respect and concepts such as integrity, autonomy and inclusion. Respect of rights, cultural and traditional values and patient's needs or desires is the main concern of a nurse. The president's council on bioethics part 3: dignity and modern culture m odern society or at least its more sophisticated parts is distinguished by its concern for individual dignity. They refuse to be reduced to useful and expendable means for ends that are not their own.

Apa Style Psychology Essay

Increasingly, modern government is based on the dignified principle that the individual can't be understood to exist for a community, a country, an ideology, a god, or even a family. We think it undignified to believe that earthly or real human beings exist for heavenly or imaginary ones, as we believe religions once led us to believe. We also think it undignified to regard today's individuals as existing for human beings of the future, as did the millenarian ideologies that disappeared with the 20th century. Protecting my dignity, from this view, means protecting what the moral fanatics are all too ready to sacrifice my particular life, my particular being, myself. 1 my purpose here is to explore some of the modern dimensions of the dignified i, and so to show how indispensable, wonderful, and strange the idea of personal dignity is for us americans. One reason for this exploration is to show how technology and biotechnology are both reflections of and challenges to our proper understanding of our ineradicable human dignity. Our understanding of the dignity of the individual or the person originates, i think, with christianity, particularly with st.

Phd Dissertation Semantic Web

We find it in augustine's criticism of the civil and natural theologies the respectable theologies of the greeks and the romans for misunderstanding who the human being is. Civil theology the gods of the city or political community is based on the premise that human beings are essentially citizens or part of a city. Human longings point beyond one's own country and can't be satisfied by any kind of political dedication or success. It's finally undignified or untruthful for a roman to identify himself or his fate with rome. Augustine didn't deny there was a certain nobility or dignity of citizens who subordinated their selfish interests for their country's common good. But even or especially the best romans were looking in the wrong place for genuine personal security and significance or immortality.

They were looking in the wrong place for personal meaning or transcendence or perfection. 2 the polytheism of civil theology was also undignified insofar as it was an offense against the human mind. It required that educated men degrade themselves by feigning belief in unbelievable gods and engage in a futile effort to fend off moral deterioration as their country became more sophisticated. Such efforts were also degrading to others they opposed the particular human being's efforts to free himself from what are finally selfish communal illusions.

Civil theology, by defining us as citizens and nothing more, hides from us the dignity that all human beings share in common. Sophisticated greeks and romans, augustine adds, rejected the gods of their country for nature's god, the god of the philosophers. But that growth in theological sophistication in the direction of impersonal monotheism was only ambiguously progress. All reasonable theology is monotheistic the orderly universe and essentially equal human beings must be governed by a single god.

First, he is too distant or too impersonal to provide any real support for the moral duties of particular human beings dignified personal action or personal existence can't be based on a god that is finally not a who but a what. Second, natural theology is based on the premise that the human being is a part of nature and nothing more. The god of the philosophers is meant as a replacement for civil theology and later becomes a competitor to biblical theology. The philosopher orients himself toward the truth about god by liberating his mind from all the moral, political, and religious illusions that allow human beings confidently to experience themselves as at home in the world as whole persons. He frees himself from the illusions that give most people some sense of dignity or significance. The philosopher discovers that the human mind is at home in the world, and so that god must be the perfection of our intellectual capacity to comprehend all that exists.

We grasp our true dignity the dignity of our minds only by seeing that the mind necessarily depends on a body that exists for a moment nowhere in particular and then is gone. So my being at home as a mind depends on my radical homelessness or insignificance as a whole, embodied being. Any being that is genuinely eternal such as a star couldn't possibly know anything at all. Only a being who is absolutely mortal or, better, absolutely contingent as a living being could know both the truth about the stars and the truth about the insignificance of himself. Nature's god can establish the dignity of human minds, but only at the expense of denying the dignity of all human lives to the extent they aren't genuinely governed by thought.

3 understanding ourselves as wholly natural beings means surrendering any sense of real personal dignity to impersonal natural necessity, to a god who is a principle, not a person. They long to be seen, in their particular, distinctive, infinitely significant freedom, by a personal god who knows them as they truly are. Natural theology can't account for equally free, unique, indispensable, and irreplaceable beings under god, or for human persons who can distinguish themselves not only from the other animals and god but from each other.

Natural theology also can't account for, much less point to the satisfaction of, the longing of each particular human being really to be. Each human being longs to be and is an exception to the general, necessitarian laws that account for the rest of creation. The augustinian criticism of both natural and civil theology on behalf of the particular person's or individual's dignity retains its force in the post christian climate of modern thought. The individual's claim for transcendent and dignified freedom actually intensifies as faith in the biblical god recedes.

Our claim is also more insistent because it can now be based in our manly pride my infinite significance no longer depends on my feigning humble self surrender to an omnipotent god who cares for me in particular. The human individual described by john locke and the other liberal philosophers regards himself as free, unique, and irreplaceable. I'm so full of dignity or inestimable worth that the whole world should center on what's best for me.