DIGNITY, LIBERTY, EQUALITY: A FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS TRIANGLE OF CONSTITUTIONALISM
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What is the relationship among fundamental rights to equality, to liberty, and to dignity? In several political and legal contexts, developments in equality law tend to be stalled by reference to dignity and have traditionally been limited based on an understanding that equality collides with liberty – as in the ideological opposition between socialism and capitalist liberalism, as in most balancing theories, and as in philosophical concepts of rights that trump one another. In addition, all three fundamental rights have been conceptualized in rather ambivalent ways, with some dominant as well as some relatively silenced philosophical (including religious) interpretations. Equality, liberty, and, particularly ambivalent, dignity carry burdens that serve as entry points for rather problematic ways of interpreting these notions. Dignity is either defined as an abstract principle or narrowed down to a right against extreme abuse, and it has been charged with moralistic ideology. Liberty and equality have mostly been set on a collision course, balanced against each other, with ideological baggage of their own. Observations in comparative constitutionalism reveal that, in some jurisdictions, dignity tends to become a black box, while equality tends to be limited by using dignity and liberty tends to trump the other two. Such studies, however, also provide inspiration for a new approach to all three fundamental rights. I propose here that we rethink their histories as well as current developments. I suggest a triangle of fundamental rights as a more appropriate metaphor to understand the complexity of cases that arise in the area and to better decide them. Dignity, equality, and liberty are, then, the corners of a triangle rather than the ends of a scale or the top and sides of a pyramid, and thus inspire a more holistic understanding of what fundamental rights are about.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.097 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.034 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.025 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".