Human Rights Health and Medicine

Abstract

Abstract IT is indisputable that the experiments conducted by German doctors during the Nazi era were gross violations of the human rights of their victims. If anything counts as a human right-one that is universally applicable to all humans-it is the right not to be forced to undergo medical experiments intended to result in death. However, the sweeping claim that unethical research undermines human rights signals a move from charging that something is unethical to alleging that it is a violation of a moral standard of the highest order. Although it is true that research subjects have rights that deserve protection, an additional argument is needed to show that the rights of research subjects should be classified under the heading of “human” rights. In an article entitled “Human Experimentation and Human Rights,” Jay Katz acknowledges that the contours of human rights are still illdefined.1 Yet Katz cites the many United Nations resolutions on human rights in support of his contention that current research regulations in the United States fail to protect the human rights of subjects of research. He asserts that research subjects possess human rights that are inviolate, but stops short of providing a full-blown argument linking the concept of human rights with the rights of research subjects. The closest he comes is to invoke the idea that “human beings possess rights to inviolate dignity.”2 However, appeals to human dignity are not intuitively more clear than appeals to human rights. If anything, they are more obscure.