I am sceptical as to the contribution that human rights can make to our evaluation of medical law. I will argue here that viewing medical law through a human rights framework provides no greater clarity, insight or focus. If anything, human rights reasoning clouds any bioethical or evaluative analysis. In Section 1 of this article, I outline the general structure of human rights reasoning. I will describe human rights reasoning as (a) reasoning from rights that each person has 'by virtue of their humanity', (b) reasoning from rights that provide 'hard to defeat' reasons for action and (c) reasoning from abstract norms to specified duties. I will then argue in Section 2 that, unless we (a) re-conceive of human rights as narrow categories of liberties, it becomes (b) necessary for our human rights reasoning to gauge the normative force of each claim or liberty. When we apply this approach to disputes in medical law, we (in the best case scenario) end up (c) 'looking straight through' the human right to the (disagreement about) values and features that each person has by virtue of their humanity.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 2. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 14 December 2014.
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#17,767,189
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Outputs from Bioethics
#998
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#143,153
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Outputs of similar age from Bioethics
#8
of 13 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 26,868,950 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 31st percentile – i.e., 31% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 13 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 38th percentile – i.e., 38% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
