What This Paper Is About
Chapter One
Syllabus topic 1, "Interrelationship of Science, Technology and Human Rights"
Pages 1 to 4 of 951
In one line
This paper asks what happens to human rights when human beings learn to do things they could not do before.
In the wording a student can write in an exam: Science, Technology and Human Rights studies the relationship between the growth of scientific knowledge and its practical applications on the one hand, and the legal protection of human dignity, freedom and equality on the other. It examines science both as a means of realising human rights and as a source of new threats to them, and it studies the response of national legal systems and of the international community to that double character.
Science and technology are not the same word
The syllabus names science and technology separately, and the distinction is not decoration.
Science is organised knowledge about the world, and the method by which that knowledge is produced and tested. It is an activity of finding out. When a laboratory establishes that a particular gene is associated with a particular disease, that is science.
Technology is the application of that knowledge to do something. It is an activity of making and using. When the same knowledge is turned into a test that can be sold to an insurance company, that is technology.
The law treats them differently because they raise different questions. Science raises questions about freedom: may the State stop a researcher from asking a question, and must it fund the asking? Technology raises questions about harm and access: who is hurt when this is used, and who is left out when it is not available to them. A student who blurs the two will answer a question about the freedom of the scientist with material about the regulation of a product, which is a different topic.
Why the law has this subject at all
For most of history the law had nothing in particular to say about scientific progress, because progress was slow enough that the ordinary law of the land absorbed it. That stopped in the twentieth century, and it stopped for two reasons that pull in opposite directions.
The first reason is that science began to deliver on a scale that made its benefits a matter of justice. Antibiotics, vaccines, sanitation and mechanised agriculture did not merely make life more comfortable; they made the difference between living and dying, and they made it unequally. Once a treatment exists, the fact that a person cannot get it stops being misfortune and becomes a distribution that somebody chose. That is the point at which a lawyer becomes interested.
The second reason is that science began to injure on a scale the ordinary law could not answer. The medical experiments carried out in the concentration camps, the atomic bombings of 1945, and the industrial disasters of the decades that followed were not ordinary wrongs done by ordinary means. They were done with the best knowledge available at the time, sometimes by the people best qualified to have it, and often lawfully under the law then in force. That combination is what a human rights framework exists to catch.
What This Paper Is About
What the paper actually covers
MU prints six topic labels and nothing else, so it is worth stating plainly what those six ask for, because the shape of the paper is not obvious from its name.
| Module | Topic | What it asks |
|---|---|---|
| I | 1 | The relationship in principle: how science and rights bear on each other |
| I | 2 | The relationship in practice: what specific developments have done to specific rights |
| II | 3 | Medicine and the Law: the one field the syllabus examines in depth |
| III | 4 | Ethics: the standards that bind researchers where the law does not reach |
| IV | 5 | Information technology, privacy and cyber terrorism |
| IV | 6 | The response of the international community |
Notice what that structure is doing. Modules I and III are about principle, Modules II and IV are about the law of two particular fields, and Module IV closes by asking whether the international response has been adequate. An examiner can therefore ask a purely conceptual question, a purely statutory question, or a question that runs across both, and this book is built so that any of the three can be answered from it.
What this paper is not
It is not a science paper. No question will require you to explain how a polymerase chain reaction works. You must understand a technology well enough to see which right it touches, and no further.
It is not a general human rights paper. Your group has five other papers for that. Here, a right is discussed because a scientific or technological development bears on it.
It is not a medical jurisprudence paper. Medical jurisprudence, in the older sense, is about medical evidence in criminal trials. Module II is about the legal regulation of medicine and the rights of patients, which is a different subject with some overlap.
A worked example, to show the method
Take a single technology and run it through the questions this paper asks. A hospital installs a system that reads scans and reports whether a tumour is present.
Which rights does it engage? The right to health, because it may find cancers earlier. Privacy, because it processes the patient's medical images. Equality, because the system was trained on data from one population and may be less accurate on another. The right to a remedy, because if it is wrong it is not obvious who is answerable.
What This Paper Is About
Who bears the duty? The hospital, as the body that chose to deploy it. The manufacturer, whose product it is. And the State, whose duty to protect means it must regulate both.
Is the benefit shared? If the system exists only in private hospitals in three cities, the technology has widened a gap rather than closed one, and Module I's right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress is engaged directly.
What does the international framework say? The 1975 Declaration requires States to extend the benefits of science to all strata of the population and to protect them from the misuse of scientific developments. The Bioethics Declaration of 2005 requires risk assessment and ethics committees.
Every one of those four questions is answered somewhere in this book. That is the method the paper is testing.
What beginners get wrong here
Treating the subject as a list of technologies. It is not. A student who memorises facts about cloning, artificial intelligence and surveillance, and learns no framework, cannot answer a question about a technology the syllabus does not mention. The framework is the point; the technologies are examples.
Assuming science is the villain. The instruments in Module IV say the opposite. The right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress is a human right, and a State that fails to develop and diffuse science is in breach of it. A one-sided answer loses marks.
Confusing ethics with law. Module III exists because much of what is objectionable in this field is not unlawful. Saying that something "violates human rights" when what you mean is that it is unethical, and not distinguishing the two, is the commonest weakness in answers on this paper.
Quick revision
- Science is knowledge and method; technology is application. Freedom questions attach to the first, harm and access questions to the second.
- The subject exists because science both delivers unequally and injures in ways ordinary law could not answer.
- Six printed topics: relationship in principle, relationship in practice, medicine, ethics, information and cyber terrorism, and the international response.
- The method: which rights are engaged, who bears the duty, is the benefit shared, what does the international framework say.
- Not a science paper, not a general human rights paper, not medical jurisprudence.
Test yourself
1. Distinguish science from technology, and say why the distinction matters in law. Science is organised knowledge and the method of producing it; technology is the application of that knowledge to do something. The distinction matters because science raises questions of freedom, chiefly the researcher's freedom to inquire and the State's duty to support inquiry, while technology raises questions of harm and of access, chiefly who is injured by a use and who is excluded from a benefit.
What This Paper Is About
2. Why did human rights law become interested in scientific progress only in the twentieth century? Because progress became fast enough and powerful enough to matter in two ways at once. Its benefits became large enough that unequal access became a question of justice rather than of luck, and its harms became large enough, and were often inflicted lawfully by qualified people, that the ordinary law of wrongs could not answer them.
3. A State refuses to fund any medical research at all. Which limb of this subject is engaged? The right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress, and specifically the State's duty to conserve, develop and diffuse science. This is the limb that shows the subject is not only about restraining science but also about requiring it.
4. Is this paper asking you to decide whether a technology is good or bad? No. It is asking you to identify which rights a technology engages, who owes duties in respect of it, whether the benefit and the risk are fairly distributed, and what the legal and ethical frameworks require. The evaluation follows from that analysis; it does not replace it.
The rest of this subject
These notes are cut from the University's printed syllabus. Open the syllabus itself, or the past papers, for the same subject.