Human Dignity, Human Rights, and Responsibility : the New Language of Global Bioethics and Biolaw / Yechiel Michael Barilan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Barilan, Yechiel Michael, 1966- author.

Series:

Basic bioethics

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Respect for persons.

Bioethics.

Medical ethics.

Human rights.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiv, 349 pages) : illustrations.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, [2012]

System Details:

text file

Summary:

"'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"--Publisher.

Contents:

1 Introduction 1

An Overview of the Book in Three Paragraphs 1

Human Dignity: The Challenges 2

On the Terminology Used in This Book 4

Cultural Orientation 17

On the Methodology 18

Human Dignity and Rights Today: The Agenda 20

2 Hermeneutics and the History of Human Dignity 23

An Overview of the History of Human Rights 23

Hermeneutics of the Biblical Sources 28

Judaism 41

Stoicism 46

Christianity 47

Torture: Turning One against Oneself 53

Lactantius 57

Slavery and Human Dignity 59

Ezra, Lactantius, and Marx 64

From Lactantius to Liberation Theology 66

Freedom in the History of Human Dignity 69

Physical, Psychological, and Cultural Diversity 71

Freedom and Chosen Slavery 71

Augustine's Descendance Principle 74

God's Friend 79

The Brief Authority of Man's Glassy Essence 80

Immanuel Kant 81

Enlightenment and Modernity 83

Human Dignity as a Phenomenology of Humanness and Solidarity 84

Suffering and Human Dignity 88

The History of Human Dignity: A Synthetic Summary 89

Challenges to the Future of Human Dignity 91

3 Reconstructing Human Dignity as a Moral Value 93

Introduction 93

Blessed Coincidences 98

Culture, Codes of Honor, and Human Dignity 100

Reverse Engineering of Human Dignity 104

Ten Uses of Human Dignity 117

Embeddedness in Reality and the "Moral Point of View" 122

Freedom and Human Dignity: Five Meanings 127

Vulnerability 140

Enforcement 144

4 Human Rights or Natural Moral Rights 149

An Outline of a Definition 149

Penology and Rights 162

Metaethics and Rights 165

Claim Rights Take Shape in Deliberative Democracies 170

Human Rights as Recipient-Centered Norms for Agents 174

Contracts and Promises 175

The Will and the Interests 177

Hybridization of Interests and Will in Human Rights 180

Transcendental Choices 183

The Implicit Maxims of Self-Alienation 189

The Right to Property 196

The Right to Privacy 203

5 Moral Status 207

Introduction 207

Shifting Harm or Diversion Dilemmas 209

The Conditions for Inviolability and Human Rights 219

Speciesism and the Argument from Marginal Cases 238

On the Moral Status of Unborn Humans 240

Dominion, Sexuality, Intimacy, and Care 254

6 Responsibility beyond Human Rights 261

Responsibility and Dignity 262

Human Dignity within Responsibilities of Intimacy 269

Responsibility for the Ethos of Human Dignity and the Conditions of Rights 278

7 A Synthetic Summary 295

Summary of the Key Philosophical Arguments 295

Existence, Identity, and Moral Status 300.

Notes:

Title from PDF title page (viewed on Oct. 11, 2012).

OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.

ISBN:

9780262305815

026230581X

1283953072

9781283953078

OCLC:

812533709

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.