Dignity, Emergency, Exception Alon Harel and Assaf Sharon Abstract This article analyzes the category of extreme cases—cases involving catastrophic consequences the avoiding of which requires severe measures (e.g., torture, shooting a plane in 9/11 situations). Our proposal maintains that what is most pernicious is not the violation of moral rules as such but their principled or rule-governed violation. Maintaining a normative distinction between acts per- formed under the direction of principles/rules, on the one hand, and unprincipled, context-generated acts, acts performed under the force of circumstances, on the other, allows for accommodating the necessity of infringements in extreme cases within a (non-conventional) deontological framework. Agents who perform acts in extreme cases ought not to be guided by rules or principles. Instead, they ought to make particular judgments not governed by rules. 1 Introduction Dignity, according to a prominent conception identified with Immanuel Kant, means incommensurable and non-exchangeable value. Thus, violations of dignity cannot be justified by their contribution to the advancement of other values. On this conception, dignity is seen as underwriting strict constraints admitting of no exceptions. Prohibitions against torture and killing of innocents, for example, are regarded as immune to consequentialist considerations. This conception comes under pressure from extreme cases, where upholding a dignity-based prohibition entails catastrophic consequences. The paper presents and criticizes the two main non-consequentialist approaches to the problem of emergencies and proposes a third approach. Emergencies, we argue, should be understood within the framework A. Harel (&) Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel e-mail: alon.harel@mail.huji.ac.il A. Sharon Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel e-mail: assafsharon@post.tau.ac.il © Springer International Publishing AG 2018 P. Auriel et al. (eds.), The Rule of Crisis, Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice 64, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74473-5_6 101 p.auriel@gmail.com