Abstract
There is a long history to the debate on the relationship between law and morality. To date, there is no clear consensus over basic questions like the extent that the substantive content of ‘law’ needs to be consistent with the moral requirements for it to be properly law. Whether there is a relationship at all depends very much on what one takes to be ‘law’ and how ‘morality’ should be understood. While it may not be a rewarding exercise to presently rehearse a debate that is well documented in the literature, fresh insights may nevertheless be gained through a more explicitly contextual evaluation. The debate may then be framed in the following manner: ‘What is the relationship (if any) between law and morality in bioethics?’ By this question, bioethics is used contextually to refer to a system of interrelated knowledge and practices that apply to the governance of biomedical research and medicine, as well as policies on these fields. It is argued that law and morality enjoys a firm and intricate relationship in bioethics, and they are mutually constitutive. Drawing on Anglo-American jurisprudence, ‘mental capacity’ in relation to mentally disabled or mentally ill persons is discussed as illustration of a phenomenon that is co-produced by law and morality.
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Ho, C.W.L., Lee, S.M. (2016). Law and Morality. In: ten Have, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09483-0_264
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