Human Rights

Abstract

Should global bioethics and international human rights be considered to arise from the same idealistic human urge to shape our interactions by universally applicable principle? Are both being threatened by the narrower greed and profit-focused principles driving corporate globalization? “Positivist” theories assert human rights (unlike bioethical principles) derive from rules of recognition embedded in four primary legal systems: international law, constitutional law, legislation, and judicial decisions applying common law precedents. In such a scheme, bioethics represents inchoate or potential legal norms that lack the economic clout that trade sanctions, for example, give otherwise more normatively problematic trade and investment agreements. One approach to “natural law” jurisprudence views human rights and bioethics, however, as presumptively cohering with principles implicit in the nature of human interactions and in reality when understood at its most fundamental and ideal forms. From such a perspective, the visionary project to develop both human rights and bioethics as counters to global corporate power exerted through trade and investment agreements may be merging into a normative quest to develop enforceable principles that encourage respect for all forms of life, not merely that of humans.