Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights: A Confucian Critique

Abstract

The paper discusses the moral position of Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights which takes human rights, and its related moral precepts, to be the fundamental ethical framework in dealing with ethical issues raised by medicine, life sciences and associated technologies as applied to human beings. The paper begins by identifying the fundamental principles as well as some other derivative and specifying principles of the ethical framework in question. It then moves to discuss some general problems with adopting the ethical framework of human rights by focusing on the rationality of the notion of human rights. The paper then discusses the moral position of the Declaration from a Confucian perspective.