Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T22:32:01.848Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Bioethics and Human Rights: Curb Your Enthusiasm

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2009

ELIZABETH FENTON  and
JOHN D. ARRAS
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The call has been made for global bioethics. In an age of pandemics, international drug trials, and genetic technology, health has gone global, and bioethics must follow suit. George Annas is one among a number of thinkers to recommend that bioethics expand beyond its traditional domain of patient–physician interactions to encompass a broader range of health-related matters. Medicine, Annas argues, must “develop a global language and a global strategy that can help to improve the health of all of the world's citizens.” Individual countries cannot address global health issues, and culturally specific principles are inadequate for addressing global bioethics concerns. We will need a language and moral framework grounded in a foundation of universally shared, transcultural judgments about humankind that will also recognize moral pluralism. The claim has been made that such a foundation already exists in human rights, and that human rights should, therefore, be the new lingua franca of bioethics.

Type
The Great Debates
Information
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , January 2010 , pp. 127 - 133
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Annas GJ. American Bioethics: Crossing Human Rights and Health Law Boundaries. New York: Oxford University Press; 2005:24.

2. See note 1, Annas 2005:24.

3. Baker R. Bioethics and human rights: A historical perspective. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 2001;10:241–52. Roberto Andorno shares this view, calling human rights “the last expression of a universal ethics,” and “a ‘lingua franca’ of international relations”; Andorno R. Biomedicine and international human rights law: In search of a global consensus. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 2002;8012:959–63.

4. For example, the United Nations’ International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1966), and the corresponding Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966).

5. See note 1, Annas 2005:40.

6. Lomasky L. Persons, Right, and the Moral Community. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 1987:3.

7. Arras JD, Fenton EM. Bioethics and human rights: Access to health-related goods. Hastings Center Report 2009:39(5):27–38.

8. This section of the paper is drawn largely from Fenton EM. Genetic enhancement—A threat to human rights? Bioethics 2009;22(1):1–7.

9. See note 1, Annas 2005:37.

10. See note 1, Annas 2005:51.

11. Warren MA. Moral Status: Obligations to Persons and Other Living Things. Oxford: Clarendon Press; 1997:19.

12. Griffin J. First steps in an account of human rights. European Journal of Philosophy 2001;9:306–27.

13. Nussbaum MC. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, nationality, species membership. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press; 2006. See also Nussbaum M. Capabilities and human rights. In: de Greiff P, Cronin C, eds. Global Justice and Transnational Politics: Essays on the Moral and Political Challenges of Globalization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 2002.

14. Some level of physical similarity is assumed in claiming that two individuals stand in a relationship of justice to one another. But genetic enhancement technology will not produce humans so different from us that this relationship of justice will not obtain. We may be more different from an unenhanced and severely mentally disabled individual than we are from an enhanced individual with a better memory, yet, because we recognize the severely disabled person as standing in the relationship of justice to us, then we will also recognize the enhanced individual as a subject of justice.

15. Not all fictional accounts of a genetically engineered future are pessimistic. The X-Men comics, for example, portray the social and political conflicts between humans and “mutants,” who are said to represent the next stage of human evolution. Importantly, the nonhumans and X-characters are portrayed, like the humans, as full agents, and peaceful coexistence among them all is viewed as possible and desirable in spite of prejudice against the mutants on the part of the unmodified humans.

16. Wikler D, Brock DW. Population-level bioethics: Mapping a new agenda. In: Dawson A, Verweij M. Ethics, Prevention, and Public Health. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press; 2007.