Women and special vulnerability: Commentary "On the principle of respect for human vulnerability and personal integrity," UNESCO, International Bioethics Committee report

In the past decade UNESCO has pursued a leadership role in the articulation of general principles for bioethics, as well as an extensive campaign to promulgate these principles globally.¹ Since UNESCO's General Conference adopted the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights in 2005, UNESCO's Bioethics Section has worked with member states to develop a "bioethics infrastructure." UNESCO also provides an "Ethics Teacher Training Course" to member states and disseminates a "core curriculum," primarily targeting medical students. The core curriculum orients itself by the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights and aims to articulate a set of "bioethical principles" that provide a "common global platform" for bioethics.

The Syllabus for the Ethics Education Program reflects UNESCO's persistent definition of bioethics as focused on "problems raised by advances in science and technology."² In concluding units of the Syllabus, "social responsibility and health," responsibility to future generations, and protection of the environment are presented as special, contemporary problems, not included among the core questions of bioethics, nor constitutive of its key concepts and principles. There is only passing mention of "inequalities between men and women," along with inequalities between regions, ethnic groups, rural and urban areas, and in legal status" (ibid., 57).

The report of UNESCO's International Bioethics Committee (IBC) "On the Principle of Respect for Human Vulnerability and Personal Integrity" appears in this context, as part of a wider effort to disseminate the Declaration through a more extended articulation of specific Articles. Article 8 of the Declaration explicitly limits the concern for "human vulnerability" to the "applying and advancing [of] scientific knowledge, medical practice and associated technologies." While the International Bioethics Committee's recent report on "special vulnerability" must be applauded for including some attention to questions of social and environmental equity, it continues to define vulnerability narrowly, in relation to science rather than justice. Given this narrow focus, the report is unable to adequately assess the role of social and political property regimes in perpetuating these vulnerabilities. Furthermore, by including gender in the class of special vulnerability, the report hides the structural role of gender in social vulnerability, at the same time that it relies uncritically on a concept of a universal ethical subject that is implicitly marked masculine.

As Onora O'Neill has argued, this narrow focus on issues raised by advances in science and technology reflects the concern of high-income countries with property rights and liability issues in research, more than the claims of ethics or justice.³ Moreover, by relying on a discourse of abstract rights, the UNESCO documents lack a critical perspective on the structural vulnerabilities that are perpetuated in the discourse of rights itself. "The emergence of 'human rights' is coterminous with the emergence of what are commonly referred to as structural inequalities—that is, with the emergence of forms of inequality that are independent of personal attributes and instead derive from modes of economic, political, and cultural organization."⁴ Indeed, the history of these abstract rights of the "human person" reveals their complicity with the history of property and their production as safeguards of the privilege of property. The mythological accounts of society's origin in a voluntary contract obscure the way in which these rights were instituted precisely to establish the validity of ownership and to secure inequities of wealth. The institution of the law of property transforms what was held by might into a right. The rhetorical strategies of rights—the fiction of the "state of nature," the myth of the voluntary social contract, the abstraction of the "person," the re-creation of man as a generic, the ideology of equality, and the institution of fraternity as a figure of the social bond—install a social logic that legitimates inequities of wealth as well as the subjection of certain classes of human as the servants of that wealth.⁵

By invoking the generic subject of the rights of man, the UNESCO documents fail to critically analyze the exclusions and inequities that are structurally...