Mary Neal

Respect for human dignity as ‘substantive basic norm’

The idea of ‘human dignity’ is, notoriously, as ambiguous as it is compelling. Notwithstanding the absence of any clear or settled definition of human dignity, either in the abstract or in terms of what it means in practice, it is an idea which takes pride of place in international legal documents, in judicial reasoning, and in scholarship across a range of disciplines, where it seems, particularly in recent years, to have become the focus for an explosion of academic interest and an accompanying proliferation of literature. Much of the existing literature attempts to uncover the meaning, or multiple meanings, of ‘human dignity’, focusing on the uncertainty surrounding the substance or content of the idea and trying to compose a catalogue of use-types. In this paper, my primary aim will be to address another type of uncertainty, namely uncertainty about the role, function or status within legal frameworks of the ‘dignity norm’ – the norm requiring respect for human dignity. I want to explore several possibilities: first, that the dignity norm is simply a proxy for respect for autonomy; second, that it is a right in the sense that we can speak of a specific ‘right to have dignity respected’; and third, that it is a legal principle. Having problematised each of these in turn, I will contend that the function of the dignity norm is best captured by describing it as the ‘substantive basic norm’ of the legal systems wherein it appears.

Conscience and agent-integrity : a defence of conscience-based exemptions in the health care context

The issue of conscientious refusal by health care practitioners continues to attract attention from academics, and was the subject of a recent UK Supreme Court decision. Activism aimed at changing abortion law and the decision to devolve governance of abortion law to the Scottish Parliament both raise the prospect of altered provision for conscience in domestic law. In this article, building on earlier work, we argue that conscience is fundamentally connected to moral integrity and essential to the proper functioning of moral agency. We examine recent attempts to undermine the view of conscience as a matter of integrity and argue that these have been unsuccessful. With our view of conscience as a prerequisite for moral integrity and agency established and defended, we then take issue with the ‘incompatibility thesis’ (the claim that protection for conscience is incompatible with the professional obligations of healthcare practitioners). We reject each of the alternative premises on which the incompatibility thesis might rest, and challenge the assumption of a public/private divide which is entailed by all versions of the thesis. Finally, we raise concerns about the apparent blindness of the thesis to issues of power and privilege, and conclude that conscience merits robust protection.

Locating lawful abortion on the spectrum of ‘proper medical treatment’

This chapter examines the concept of proper medical treatment in relation to lawful abortion, particularly in light of the campaign to decriminalise abortion altogether. It sketches a spectrum of proper medical treatment, from the paradigmatically proper to the liminally proper, and considers abortion against this spectrum. Rejecting both the suggestion that lawful abortion is always paradigmatically proper treatment, and the claim that it can only ever be “liminally” proper at best, an account is developed in which the status of abortion depends upon a range of factors, including the grounds upon which it is performed and public interests considerations.