Edith Stein did write a few comments on human dignity, but nothing that amounts to a thorough analysis. The idea was formulated explicitly as the foundation of the Human Rights Tradition after the Second World War, and as such it would no doubt have interested her greatly. The drafters of the declaration of human rights deliberately refrained from appealing to an agreement about the philosophical foundation of the idea, since UNESCO advised it might not be possible to find a solution all could accept. In Stein’s spirit of conciliation of different traditions, however, and with the aid of her phenomenology, we can propose to understand it phenomenologically as the fundamental value of the human being, entitling it to respect. In this paper I detail how it comes about that we with quasi-necessity identify human dignity in this way by deploying a phenomenological analysis as Stein taking Stein’s analyses as its model.