The Book · Chapter 5 of 28
Chapter 5Natural Law, Dignity and the Moral Limits of Automation
What must a legal order preserve about the person when it processes decisions through computation?
The chapter develops
The Human Dignity Constraint.
The Human Dignity Constraint
Formal consistency cannot justify dehumanising or substantively unjust operation.
Doctrine 4 of the Book’s twenty-one. A proposed formulation, not an enacted rule.
Summary
What must remain of the person when administration acts upon a computational representation? Drawing on natural-law traditions, accounts of dignity and objections to human-decision rights, this chapter proposes the Human Dignity Constraint. Formal validity, consistent execution and predictive success cannot alone settle whether public power treats its subjects justly. The argument specifies three limits: reduction forbids treating data as exhaustive of the person; confrontation requires a meaningful opportunity to be heard and answered; abdication requires an empowered, answerable institution and preserves judgments entrusted to a competent decision-maker. The chapter also examines optimisation, unequal error burdens, vulnerability and access to exception, using a constructed benefits example and carefully limited legal comparisons. It presents these requirements as jurisprudential proposals, not universal existing law. Their intensity is proportionate, routine automation remains possible, and the treatment of validity, detailed procedure and reserved human functions is assigned to later chapters.
- Human Dignity Constraint
- Non-Exhaustion Principle
- reduction limit
- confrontation limit
- abdication limit
- vulnerability
- substantive legitimacy
- error distribution
The chapter text
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