Why catastrophic events, human enhancement and progress in robotics may limit individual health rights

Abstract

Despite the fact that people usually believe that individual health rights have an intrinsic value, they have, in fact, only extrinsic value. They are context dependent. While in normal conditions the current societies try to guarantee individual health rights, the challenge arises in emergency situations. Ones of them are pandemics including current covid-19 pandemic. Emergency situations challenge individual health rights due to insufficient medical resources and non-random criteria of selection of patients. However, there are some reasons to assume that societal and technological processes in the near future will threaten permanently individual health rights in normal conditions. Such processes include progress in commonly available human enhancement technologies, and progress in robotics and automation. In this paper I show how individual health rights will be challenged in both scenarios including catastrophic events and future technological progress. In both cases, the idea of assisted dying is discussed as possibly the unique healthcare principle available for people whose individual health rights will be limited or canceled due to catastrophes or technological and financial exclusion. The special case of future space missions is also discussed as an example of an extreme environment affecting the way moral norms are viewed in health care ethics.