Technologies That Did Not Exist in 1975

In one line

The framework was finished before the technologies that now matter most existed, and the useful question is not whether it is out of date but at which joint each new technology breaks it.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the normative framework of this paper was built between the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 and the UNESCO Bioethics Declaration 2005, with the 1975 Declaration and article 15 of the Covenant at its centre; the technologies that now raise the hardest questions, mass data processing, artificial intelligence, gene editing and neurotechnology, either did not exist or were not foreseen when it was written; and the framework nevertheless reaches most of them, because it is stated in terms of interests protected rather than things regulated, failing only where a new technology's harm falls outside every interest it recognises.

Why the framework has lasted

Because it names interests, not objects. Article 6 of the 2005 Declaration requires prior, free, express and informed consent to any preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention. Nothing in it depends on knowing which interventions exist. Article 15(1)(b) of the Covenant gives the right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications, which covers applications not yet made. Paragraph 6 of the 1975 Declaration protects privacy and the protection of the human personality and its physical and intellectual integrity, which was written about the technologies of 1975 and reads as though written about neurotechnology.

Because it says so. The 1975 preamble speaks of neutralising present and possible future harmful consequences. The nine judges in [Privacy as a Fundamental Right] said that the Constitution must evolve with the felt necessities of time, that its meaning cannot be frozen on the perspectives present when it was adopted, and that the rapid growth of technology may render obsolescent many notions of the present. Both instruments were written by people who knew they were writing for a future they could not see.

And because the classes are open. Article 11 of the 1997 Declaration prohibits practices which are contrary to human dignity, such as reproductive cloning of human beings. The example is illustrative and the class is open, so the prohibition can take in members nobody had thought of, which is exactly what article 24's reference to the International Bioethics Committee identifying such practices contemplates.

Where it breaks, and the four joints

[The Ethics of Emerging Technology] identified three; the fourth belongs to this chapter because it is about the instruments rather than about the technologies.

The consent joint: a subject who does not yet exist

The technology. Germ-line gene editing changes every descendant.