Band 58, Heft 1

Mass Media and new social media are one of the most significant indicators for deep transformations our societies are currently undergoing. This brings along serious problems how we can organize and stabilize our public life, especially in questions of democratic representation and self-government. It is for this reason the article first discusses critically the rhetoric talk of media as »fourth power in state« to consider then the function and role (mass and social) media morally should have in democratic civil societies. Thereby, a normative concept of public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) will be proposed that involves aspects of a professional ethics for both, producers and consumers of public opinion. Reconsidering therefore ecclesiology as an exemplary theory of public sphere can provide a paradigm for understanding constructively Christian communal life within a pluralistic media society.

This article explores the ethical implications of the dialectics between the human being’s visibility and invisibility by means of a phenomenological approach: In what ways can ›human dignity‹ be experienced, and to what extent does it, as a normative notion, transcend its possible givenness to experience? While there is a consensus that the requirement of respect is implied in this notion, it is controversial how this requirement is realized and fulfilled. Kierkegaard’s ethics of loving vision and Sartre’s description of the objectifying gaze inform a discussion of the feeling of shame: can it protect the dignity of the other person? The following three levels of argumentation will be taken into account: (1) An exchange of glances denoting reciprocal recognition can, on the level of factuality, count as the condition for the (inter)subjective constitution of human dignity insofar as it can be experienced in actual contexts of interaction. (2) In a legal context, the constitutional principle of all people’s invisible, inviolable dignity, which is the source of their rights and deserves protection regardless of people’s characteristics and behavior, must be defended against the idea that human dignity is nothing but a contingent, self-posited norm or gradual attribute. (3) The theological dimension of human dignity is considered in regard to its non-empirical ground and destination (the biblical motif of the human being as imago Dei) and to the question of whether human dignity persists post mortem.