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Notes
Here, I am unable to go into any detail on the various reasons why the above-mentioned approaches fail because it would go far beyond the scope of this introduction.
For example, the Nuremberg Code (1947); the Declaration of Helsinki (1964); the Proposed International Guidelines for Biomedical Research involving Human Subjects (1982); the Declaration concerning the Human Genome and Human Rights (1997); the European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine (1997); the additional protocol of the European Convention with regard to the Prohibition of Cloning Human Beings (1998); and, most recently, the Universal Draft Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights (2005).
Tom Beauchamp and James Childress appeal to Richardson’s method of specification in their four-principles approach and use it in order to flesh out the abstract principles. In the article ‘Applying the Four-Principles Approach’ (Gordon et al. 2011), we have shown in great detail how the method of specification is used in order to solve concrete problems.
The notion of human dignity is certainly one of the most controversial and avidly discussed concepts in ethics, in particular in the field of bioethics, and has been for the last six or seven decades. Nevertheless, many clarifications still have to be made concerning the nature of human dignity, such as: the ontological status that deals with the question of whether human dignity is unconditional or conditional; the epistemological status that concerns the question of how to determine the content of human dignity; the moral status that concerns issues surrounding the normative pre-conditions and implications that follow from the notion of human dignity; and, finally, the legal status that concerns the relation between human rights and human dignity, for example, in international law. The many details of this complex topic are controversially discussed in philosophy. The last century was rife with intriguing approaches to understanding the nature of human dignity and its relation to human rights in bioethics on different levels, such as international and national legal documents and ethical guidelines, books and research articles. The range of different views on human dignity is diverse and reaches from ‘incoherent and unhelpful’ to ‘illuminating and important.’ Many bioethicists, however, try to avoid ‘dignity-talk’ completely, since they believe that this notion is too vague, reactionary and redundant to facilitate and enhance the bioethical debate in general and to solve complex cases in particular (e.g. Harris 1998, 1999; Kuhse 2000; Macklin 2003; Benatar 2005; Cochrane 2009; Schüklenk and Pacholczyk 2010). Occasionally, medical doctors, researchers, and bioethicists claim that the appeal to human dignity and human rights in bioethics hinders the otherwise easy treatment of patients in end-of-life decisions, the study of research subjects in developing countries, research on human subjects belonging to minority groups (e.g. the Tuskegee syphilis study and human radiation experiments), and particular ethical issues such as organ sales, cloning, human-animal hybrids and other issues concerning biotechnology.
Gewirth’s principle of generic consistency requires agents to act in accordance with the generic rights, i.e. the rights to generic needs of agency, of all agents. “Things that are needed for the very possibility of acting Gewirth calls ‘basic’ needs (or ‘basic goods’). These include life itself, capacities involved in an ability to make choices, possession of mental equilibrium sufficient to enable one to translate one’s preferences into active pursuit of one’s purposes, as well as the necessary means to these (meaning those things the absence of—or interference with which—will threaten or interfere with life, etc.). In the case of human agents food, clothing, shelter, and health will be included among these necessary means (see 1978a: 54)” (Beyleveld and Brownsword 2001, p.70).
Precautionary reasoning obliges agents “to presume that all creatures that behave as though they are agents are agents” (Beyleveld and Brownsword 2001, p. 113).
The only passage in which he refers to a ‘human right to health care’ is: “Only after we have a clear understanding of what a just social arrangement in health care is, can there be discussion about a human right to health care” (2012: 2nd section). For an account of a human right to health care, see my article ‘Poverty, Human Rights, and Just Distributions’ (Gordon 2008).
I have examined this issue in great detail in my forthcoming article, ‘Human dignity, human rights, and global bioethics’ (Gordon 2012).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the contributors for their interesting and highly stimulating articles, which will hopefully influence and certainly enrich the future debates concerning human rights in bioethics. I particularly thank all referees for their valuable time and helpful comments; I am sure that we all benefited from their expertise. I am truly thankful to the editors of this journal, particularly Bert Musschenga, for making this special issue possible and for all their support from the first steps to the final product. Last, but not least, this work was envisaged in the context of my stay at Queen’s University Kingston in Canada and was funded by the Heinrich Hertz Foundation (HHS, B41 No. 44/08).
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Gordon, JS. Human Rights in Bioethics–Theoretical and Applied. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 15, 283–294 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-012-9365-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-012-9365-4