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Human Rights and American Bioethics: Resistance Is Futile

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2009

GEORGE J. ANNAS
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Extract

The Borg are always confident that humans will be assimilated into their collective hive and therefore that, as they say, “resistance is futile.” In Star Trek, of course, the humans always successfully resist. Elizabeth Fenton and John Arras, like the Borg, resist the idea that humans are uniquely special as well as the utility of the human rights framework for global bioethics. I believe their resistance to human rights is futile, and I explain why in this essay. Let me begin with their subtitle, because we do seem to agree that popular culture is a powerful aid to understanding human actions and motivations.

Type
The Great Debates
Information
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , January 2010 , pp. 133 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1. Fenton E, Arras J. Bioethics and human rights: Curb your enthusiasm. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 2010;19:127–133 (this issue).

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

3. Annas GJ. The American right to health. Hastings Center Report 2009;39(5):3.

4. See note 2, Annas 2005:160–2. See also, e.g., Jonsen A. The Birth of Bioethics. New York: Oxford University Press; 1992.

5. See, generally, Annas GJ, Grodin M. The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation. New York: Oxford University Press; 1992; Shuster E. Fifty years later: The significance of the Nuremberg Code. New England Journal of Medicine 1997;337:1436–40.

6. Fenton E. Liberal eugenics and human nature: Against Habermas. Hastings Center Report 2006;36(6):35–42; Fenton E. Genetic enhancement: A threat to human rights? Bioethics 2008;22(1):1–7.

7. The most persuasive argument on the “inherent” nature of human rights is made by Johannes Morsink in Inherent Human Rights: Philosophical Roots of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; 2009. Contra, Rawls J. The Law of Peoples, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 1999:78–105; and MacIntyre A. After Virtue, 2nd ed. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press; 1984:62–78.

8. See, generally, President's Council on Bioethics. Human Dignity and Bioethics: Essays Commissioned by the President's Council on Bioethics. Washington, DC: President's Council on Bioethics; 2008. See also Fukuyama F. Our Posthuman Future. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 2002:148–77.

9. Rorty R. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin; 1999:85–6; and see Rorty R. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press; 1991.

10. See note 2, Annas 2005:35.

11. See, e.g., Hanley R. Is Data Human? The Metaphysics of Star Trek. New York: Basic Books; 1997.

12. Annas GJ, Andrews LB, Isasi RM. Protecting the endangered human: Toward an international treaty prohibiting cloning and inheritable alterations. American Journal of Law & Medicine 2002;28:151–78.

13. See Isasi RM, Annas GJ. To clone alone: The United Nations’ human cloning declaration. Law and the Human Genome Review 2006;24:13–26; Isasi RM, Annas GJ. Bioethics and cloning: The ABCs of gestating a United Nations cloning convention. Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 2003;35:397–414.

14. See note 2, Annas 2005:37.

15. See note 2, Annas 2005:38.

16. See note 2, Annas 2005:38.

17. See note 2, Annas 2005:40.

18. See also Harris J. Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 2007:23–5.

19. Marcuse H. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press; 1966:52 (originally published in 1955).

20. See note 19, Maucuse 1966, citing Freud S. Why war? In: Collected Papers V, 273.

21. See note 1, Fenton Arras 2010;19:127–133.

22. See, e.g., Physicians for Human Rights, Aiding Torture: Health Professionals’ Ethics and Human Rights Violations Demonstrated in the May 2004 CIA Inspector General's Report; available at http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/library/news-2009-08-31.html (last accessed 31 Aug 2009).

23. Annas GJ. Human rights outlaws: Nuremberg, Geneva, and the Global War on Terrror. Boston University Law Review 2007;87:427–66.

24. Annas GJ. Worst Case Bioethics: Death, Disaster, and Public Health. New York: Oxford University Press; 2010.