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Budapest W9: Emerging Technology and Human Rights - Class notes

From Molar to Molecular 

Molar: Life as organic unity made of limbs, organs, tissues, flows of blood hormones and so forth - immediately observable by sight
Molecular: life as information - cybernetic body that can be re/coded

1. Molecular biopolitics is superimposed over molar
2. Bio-politics isn't "new"

Rose - bodies in the 20th century become less cyborgised and more biologised
Reference to Haraway

Destablisation of the mind/body dualism:
- Biology is not imagined as a given anymore which entails increased burden of responsibility
- Cartesian dualism is collapsing but on the side of the body

Shifting boundaries of a human body
"What is clear, however, is that the classical distinction made in moral philosophy between that which is not human - ownable, tradeable, commodifiable - and that which is human - not legitimate material for such commodification - can no longer do the work that is required to resolve this issue: that distinction is itself what is at stake in the politics of the contemporary bioeconomy" p.39

Biocitizens
- Foucauldian approach: new power arrangements produce new resistances
- Emergence of new subjectivities that refuse top-down disciplinary organisation of population health
-"[T]he corporeal existence and vitality o the self has become the privileged site of experiments with the self" p.26

Murphy: Health and Human Rights

 UDHR - non-binding, late arrival but does but health in a broader perspective

Public health - full range of rights and the power of a rights-based approach to health
New language of claims-making around health: one rooted in dignity, freedom or basic needs

Views from here and now
Public health appears to be a force for human rights. Has accessed steered attention away from prevention? Or HIV/Aids from other illnesses?
Inequality and inequity:
- Equality remains an underdeveloped commitment as regards EXC rights
- Equity in health does not seem to have had much penetration in HR's either
Managerial Human Rights
- Benchmarks and their companion indicators are a cause for concern
- Distortions from interventions, political questions, rise in proceduralisation

Right to Health and other health and health-related rights
The right to control one's health and body, including sexual and reproductive freedom and the right to be free from interference, such as the right to be free from torture, experimentation and non-consensual medical treatment

The right to health - The right to control one's health and body, including sexual and reproductive freedom and the right to be free from interference, such as the right to be free from torture, experimentation and non-consensual medical treatment

Health Rights Litigation:
Arrival of new technologies is broadening the sense of what it means to be healthy
Individuals emphasis their disease, their drugs, their treatment that they use, which can lead to a disparity among people and what they can articulate their interests
Companies promote patient paradigms that are already in place
Increasing cosmopolitanism of courts and quasi-courts

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