Human dignity, the basic value of human beings founding human rights, has played a seminal role in the history of Europe. Limiting/or linguistic reasons the investigation to Western Europe, we can talk about it being expressed in four different historical contexts, channeling the idea towards formulation in characteristic and characteristically different ways. The classical, medieval, modern and postmodern contexts promote different conceptualizations depending on prevailing ethical, political, metaphysical and religious conventions obtaining in these and in the traditions issuing.from them. These sets of conventions - in terms of which 'foundations' for the idea are formulated - survive in their diversity in our present context and allows far contrasting formulations of the idea, resulting in the idea being often regarded as nebulous. This paper argues that all the different historical contexts could be seen to converge on it being the basic value of human beings originating human justice even if our expectations to the effect of the idea occasion a competition between different context-dependent anthropologies in Europe.