Global Bioethics And Human Rights

"The ethical issues we face in healthcare, justice, and human rights extend beyond national boundaries-they are global and cross-cultural in scope. The second edition of this interdisciplinary and international collection features new essays on gender identity, vaccines, stem cells, bioterror, and other pressing contemporary concerns"--

The ethical issues we face in healthcare, justice, and human rights extend beyond national boundaries--they are global and cross-cultural in scope. The second edition of this interdisciplinary and international collection features new essays on gender identity, vaccines, stem cells, bioterror, and other pressing contemporary concerns.

Human annihilation has never been so easy. Artificial intelligence-guided genetic-engineered nanotechnology and robotics (AI-GNR) are widely recognized as our most transformative technological revolution ever, yet we do not even have a common moral language to unite our pluralistic world to prevent an AI apocalypse should this revolution explode out of our control. This book is the first known comprehensive global bioethical analysis of AI and AI-GNR by defining the Thomistic-Aristotelian personalist foundation of the rights and duties-based social contract framework of the United Nations, and then applying it to AI. As such, it creates a compelling approach which will appeal to scientists, health professionals, policy makers, politicians, students, and anyone interested in our shared survival around shared solutions.

A novel and multidisciplinary exposition and theorization of human dignity and rights, brought to bear on current issues in bioethics and biolaw. “Human dignity” has been enshrined in international agreements and national constitutions as a fundamental human right. The World Medical Association calls on physicians to respect human dignity and to discharge their duties with dignity. And yet human dignity is a term—like love, hope, and justice—that is intuitively grasped but never clearly defined. Some ethicists and bioethicists dismiss it; other thinkers point to its use in the service of particular ideologies. In this book, Michael Barilan offers an urgently needed, nonideological, and thorough conceptual clarification of human dignity and human rights, relating these ideas to current issues in ethics, law, and bioethics. Combining social history, history of ideas, moral theology, applied ethics, and political theory, Barilan tells the story of human dignity as a background moral ethos to human rights. After setting the problem in its scholarly context, he offers a hermeneutics of the formative texts on Imago Dei; provides a philosophical explication of the value of human dignity and of vulnerability; presents a comprehensive theory of human rights from a natural, humanist perspective; explores issues of moral status; and examines the value of responsibility as a link between virtue ethics and human dignity and rights. Barilan accompanies his theoretical claim with numerous practical illustrations, linking his theory to such issues in bioethics as end-of-life care, cloning, abortion, torture, treatment of the mentally incapacitated, the right to health care, the human organ market, disability and notions of difference, and privacy, highlighting many relevant legal aspects in constitutional and humanitarian law.

Editors Wanda Teays, John-Stewart Gordon, and Alison Dundes Renteln have assembled the works of an interdisciplinary, international team of experts in bioethics into a comprehensive, innovative and accessible book. Topics covered range from torture and lethal injection to euthanasia, sex selection, vulnerable human subjects, to health equity, safety and public health, and environmental disasters like Bhopal, Fukushima, and more.

The Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, 2005, marked a significant step towards the recognition of universal standards in the field of science and medicine. This book provides an overview of the ethical and legal developments which have occurred in the field of bioethics and human rights since then. The work critically analyzes the Declaration from an ethical and legal perspective, commenting on its implementation, and discussing the role of non-binding norms in international bioethics. The authors examine whether the Declaration has contributed to the understanding of universal or global bioethics, and to what degree states have implemented the principles in their domestic legislation. The volume explores the currency of the Declaration vis-à-vis the more recent developments in technology and medicine and looks ahead to envisage the major bioethical challenges of the next twenty years. In this context, the book offers a comprehensive ethical and legal study of the Declaration with an in-depth analysis of the meaning of the provisions, in order to clarify the extension of human rights in the field of medicine and the obligations incumbent upon UNESCO member States, with reference to their implementation practice.

In October 2005, UNESCO Member States adopted by acclamation the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights. For the first time in the history of bioethics, some 190 countries committed themselves and the international community to respect and apply fundamental ethical principles related to medicine, the life sciences and associated technologies. This publication provides a new impetus to the dissemination of the Declaration, and is part of the organisation's continuous effort to contribute to the understanding of its principles worldwide. The authors, who were almost all involved in the elaboration of the text of the Declaration, were asked to respond on each article: Why was it included? What does it mean? How can it be applied? Their responses shed light on the historical background of the text and its evolution throughout the drafting process. They also provide a reflection on its relevance to previous declarations and bioethical literature, and its potential interpretation and application in challenging and complex bioethical debates.

The UNESCO International Bioethics Committee is an international body that sets standards in the field of bioethics. This collection represents the contributions of the IBC to global bioethics. The IBC is a body of 36 independent experts that follows progress in the life sciences and its applications in order to ensure respect for human dignity and freedom. Currently, some of the topics of the IBC contributions have been discussed in the bioethics literature, mostly journal articles. However, this is a unique contribution by the scholars who developed these universal declarations and reports. The contributors have not only provided a scholarly up to date discussion of their research topics, but as members of the IBC they have also discussed specific practical challenges in the development of such international documents. This book will be suited to academics within bioethics, health care policy and international law.