Global Biomedicine, Human Dignity, and the Moral Justification of Political Power

Abstract

Contemporary bioethics is characterized by an aspiration on the part of many to establish in international law, conventions, and policy a single, globally guiding understanding of moral principles that can shape health care policy across the world. This aspiration to universal validity has deep roots in Western European moral and philosophical commitments that framed the Enlightenment and found its particularly stringent and influential expression in the thought of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). These commitments have inspired the human rights movements that took shape after the Second World War and gave new force to the French Revolution’s endeavor to establish positive moral claims that are supposed to be compellingly rational and therefore universally valid. This vision of a general humanitarian morality presupposes that individuals fully realize their human dignity only in a society that is at the same time a moral community bound by a content-rich understanding of human rights that should transcend national borders.¹ In terms of these commitments not only all particular value communities, but equally all particular political societies should be recast so as to frame one globally unified society as a universal moral community, within which those positive rights are realized.

I wish to thank H.T.Engelhardt, Jr., for his helpful criticism of this article.