Abstract
In Western, democratic societies, law and faith are usually kept distinct. Nevertheless did religious ideas also have a significant impact on the development of legal ideas in the Western world. This has been most notable in the development of human rights law based on Natural Law thought. Yet, human rights are universal and not dependent on specific cultural ideas, which is also the idea behind the universal accessibility of Natural Law. Today, human rights are defined in international documents, both binding treaties and non-binding but nevertheless notable, soft law documents. The right to access to effective health care is universal in nature and not dependent on citizenship, gender, age, faith, or other factors. While it was the Western world, which had been shaped by Christianity, which formed international law until long into the twentieth century, today’s international law is based on the global community which no longer includes sovereign nations but encompasses everybody. This text looks at the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights from a comparative cultural-religious perspective. The focus, though, is on the issue of universality and on the question how the universal approach found in Catholic Christianity has contributed to universality in modern human rights thinking, in particular when it comes to the right to access to effective health care. This then leads to the question of positive human rights obligations in the context of social responsibility.
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Notes
- 1.
See (Dabrock 2004, p. 20).
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
See (Andorno 2007, p. 152) and Andorno’s rejection of this claim ibid.
- 5.
See (Häyry and Takala 2005, p. 231).
- 6.
See, e.g., (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. 2004).
- 7.
See also the development from Matthew 15:24 to Matthew 28:19. The Bible translations used for the creation of this text are The New American Bible and Biblia Sacra Vulgatae Editionis.
- 8.
See (Allen 2009, pp. 21 et seq).
- 9.
Galatians 3:28.
- 10.
See (Paúl 2012).
- 11.
See the examples provided by (Faunce 2005, p. 177).
- 12.
(Kirchner 2013a, p. 29), footnotes omitted. Note that the apparent contradiction to No. 1955 of the Catechism in this earlier text concerning the phrase “divine law” is based on a more narrow use of the terms “law” and “divine” in my 2013 text when compared to the Catechism and is by no means to be understood to mean a difference in substance, which, I would hope, is clarified later in my 2013 text when the God as the source of Natural Law is highlighted but which could be misunderstood if one were to look only at that particular passage. It can even be argued that God is the ultimate reason for human compliance with legal or moral norms, see (Hoerster 2009, p. 60) but see also ibid., p. 71.
- 13.
(Langlois 2008, p. 49); see also more generally (Andorno 2002, pp. 960 et seq).
- 14.
Luke 10:29–37.
- 15.
On suffering, see (John Paul II 2014).
- 16.
On problems associated with such an approach from a legal rather than a theological perspective, see (Kirchner 2011, pp. 66 et seq).
- 17.
On the Catholic perspective, see (Hartin 1999, pp. 57 et seq).
- 18.
See in more detail (Andorno 2009), reprinted as (Andorno 2013).
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Kirchner, S. (2018). The Universal Human Right to Access to Effective Health Care: A Catholic Christian Response to Aasim Padela. In: Tham, J., Durante, C., García Gómez, A. (eds) Religious Perspectives on Social Responsibility in Health . Advancing Global Bioethics, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71849-1_16
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