Human Dignity, Expressive Harm, and Interpretive Convergence
This research program connects my work on human dignity, legal expressivism, expressive harm, and the interpretive convergence theory of law. Across these projects, I ask how legal practices preserve or deny a person's standing as someone who can claim, refuse, receive reasons, and contest public power. On this view, dignity is not a master value above liberty and equality; it names the standing from which liberty and equality can be claimed as owed.
Program Structure
Human Dignity
The dignity work examines hard cases in which welfare, autonomy, liberty, equality, or ordinary rights descriptions do not fully explain what has gone wrong. The central concern is claimable standing: how a person appears before law as a bearer of claims, reasons, and answerability.
Expressive Harm
The expressivist work asks what legal statements, decisions, and practices mean within a legal order. It does not reduce expressive harm to a private loss of self-meaning. The current program preserves its insight about semantic integrity and participants' acceptance attitudes, while reconstructing that insight as a diagnostic account of public standing.
Interpretive Convergence
The convergence work explains how legal meaning becomes stable through legal acts, institutional roles, public reason-giving, uptake, contestation, and correction. It supplies the institutional layer: how expressive meanings become part of legal practice and how they can fail to remain answerable to those governed by law.
Standing and Public Justification
The shared question is whether legal practice preserves persons as possible claimants and addressees of reasons. The program treats symbolic severity, second-personal authority, and institutional convergence as three explanatory layers of one standing problem.
Orientation
Liberty asks how choice and action are constrained; equality asks how persons are compared and classified; dignity asks whether a person remains an addressee of reasons and a possible bearer of claims within legal practice. The three concepts therefore overlap, but they do not do the same work. Dignity explains why some wrongs feel like an attack on a person's standing before law, even when welfare, autonomy, liberty, or equality descriptions capture only part of the case.
The current account uses a three-layer explanation, not three separate concepts of dignity. The phenomenological and symbolic layer preserves the force of cases involving humiliation, bodily exposure, death, and severe sexual wrongs. The second-personal layer explains why the wrong is not just distress, but a failure of claim, demand, accountability, and recognition. The institutional layer asks whether legal practice stabilizes, contests, corrects, or instead reproduces that failure.
The program does not treat every offensive message or every disagreement as a dignity violation. Legal expressivism remains the diagnostic layer: expressive harm identifies how legal action can strain the semantic integrity of a legal order. Interpretive convergence is the structural layer: it asks how that meaning becomes public, contestable, and answerable within legal practice.
Related Work
- Legal Expressivism and the Nature of Expressive Harm, Korean Journal of Legal Philosophy 22(2): 79-124 (2019). KCI
- Understanding Human Dignity as a Topological Concept, Korean Journal of Legal Philosophy 21(1): 295-338 (2018). KCI
- Justification of a Moral Claim to Respect Human Dignity, Korean Journal of Legal Philosophy 23(1): 37-76 (2020). KCI
- The Interpretive Convergence Theory of Law, Korean Journal of Legal Philosophy 28(3): 199-237 (2025). KCI
- Legal Acts and Legal Agents: Interpretive Convergence, Institutional Roles, and the Structure of Legal Practice, Korean Journal of Legal Philosophy 29(1): 35-87 (2026). DOI
Public Version Note
This page is a public orientation to a connected research program. Published articles should be cited through their journal records, DOI, or KCI pages. The book project and any ongoing manuscript work are described here only in outline.