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Ethical Values and Human Rights - Coggle Diagram
Ethical Values and Human Rights
Justifications of invasions of liberty, autonomy and privacy
Ethical values are important when considering any restrictions that should be put on the ways in which biological samples and fingerprints are obtained and whether they should be retained.
The method by which one seeks to resolve conflicting interests (balance between personal liberty and common good) depends on the philosophical approach adopted. Three major approaches are; utilitarian, right-based, and duty-based.
Utilitarianism: Seek the greatest benefit for the greatest number. This would support the increased DNA profiling and sampling. Yet utilitarians believe in the free development of individuality, so there is a limit to legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence. Although a utilitarian approach does not include a balancing of interests, the very attempt to maximize social welfare would in itself incorporate a balancing exercise.
Rights-based: Certain personal rights are so important that they should not be sacrificed for the greater good.
Duty-based: We are subject to certain moral obligations irrespective of the rights of others and irrespective of the consequences of our actions.
Ethical Values
Liberty: Could be referred to as freedom from a legal restraint or "the necessary conditions for the freedom which we believe people ought to be able to enjoy in modern liberal societies". Liberty should not be related to a freedom license, not every constraint on people acts to interfere in their liberty
Autonomy: Independence and personal responsibility. For Kant, autonomy means the distinctively human capacity for rational thought and action in accordance with the moral law. Frankfurt puts more emphasis on the idea of self-governance.
Privacy: Generally recognized that everyone has a protected zone into which neither the state or other people should intrude. A balance between privacy and other ethical considerations has to be found. There are to conceptions useful to this discussion; spatial privacy and informational privacy. Spatial privacy is "a state of non access to the individual's physical or psychological self", while informational privacy refers to personal information about an individual that is in a state of non-access to others. Another aspect is anonymity, which is the right to escape from the intense surveillance situations.
Informed consent: This removes any ethical objection based on liberty or autonomy to the taking.
Equality: People's lives and fundamental interests are of equal worth, is that likes should be treated alike unless there is a justification for not doing so.
Civil liberties and human rights
Rights like privacy and equality were not entrenched in law in the UK untill recently. The classical brittish vew was that personal liberty is protected from the arbitraty interferency by the supremacy of Parliament and the rule of law
This led to a growing body of equality and human rights legislation, including the Human Rights Act 1998. One of the convention rights that is relevant to the forensic use of bioinformation is the right to a fair trial (Art. 6). A second convention right of relevance is the right to respect for private and family life (Art. 8)
The "no reason to fear if you are innocent" argument.
This argument ignores any intrinsic value that might be placed on liberty, privacy and autonomy, and focuses solely on the more concrete forms of harm that might come to individuals as a result of inclusion on the NDNAD. There are 2 principal reasons why this argument is fallacious.
If innocent, simply being the subject of a criminal investigation by police can cause harm, distress, and stigma
There are reasons to believe that erroneous implications concerning criminality may be drawn from the fact that a person's profile is on the NDNAD