Carolina Pereira

In certain countries, the public authorities have shaped the provision of death on request, in certain circumstances, as a legal right, implying a public obligation to dispense death. Death is thus the provision to be supplied, the object of the right. Spain's latest legislation on euthanasia and assisted suicide is a paradigmatic case. The purpose of this paper is to consider this bio-right as a new right, belonging to a new and distinct category of rights –not just a further generation of rights continuing the previous ones. To this end, it firstly focuses on the claim that this new bio-right is grounded on classic rights, of previous generations –a claim found both in the academic discourse and in recent Spanish legislation. Secondly, therefore, it tries to analyse the relevant features of this new bio-right that can also be found in other new rights, in order to confirm a previously launched proposal for the differentiation of this new category of rights. Finally, in conclusion, it points out some aspects of the understanding of the Law that these new rights imply: new rights form part of a Law that is also new.

Principlism, the account of Bioethics proposed by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress in their work Principles of Biomedical Ethics, is presented by the authors as a guide to the practice of biomedical Ethics resulting from the determination of four basic moral principles that are part of the common morality, understood, in its turn, as a set of universally shared moral beliefs. In spite of the appeal of the proposal, some objections can be made. This paper seeks to introduce the following question: what authority does the common morality confer to Principlism? Because, if Principlism does not pretend the background of the authority of the common morality, in what way does Principlism contribute to Bioethics?