Martín Hevia

Under the Inter-American Human Rights System, individuals have a right to access reproductive technologies. This is so in virtue of the 2012 Inter-American Court of Human Rights landmark reproductive rights decision in Artavia Murillo v. Costa Rica, in which the Court held that a complete ban on reproductive technologies, and assisted reproductive technologies in particular, interferes with the right to a private and family life, which includes the decision to become a parent, as well the option and access to the means to materialize that private decision. In spite of the Artavia Murillo ruling, the legal status of surrogacy agreements in State Parties to the American Convention on Human Rights is uncertain. This paper examines whether surrogacy is compatible with the Inter-American System of Human Rights. It focuses on three types of potential objections to the legalization of surrogacy: “corruption arguments,” that is, the idea that surrogacy corrupts maternity; “child welfare concerns,” that is, the idea that surrogacy should not be allowed because of its effects on resulting children; and the potential exploitation of surrogates. The author of this article concludes that these objections are not convincing but that the American Convention on Human Rights requires regulatory schemes that protect the rights of surrogates, intending parents, and children.

This book offers a first rate selection of academic articles on Latin American bioethics. It covers different issues, such as vulnerability, abortion, biomedical research with human subjects, environment, exploitation, commodification, reproductive medicine, among others. Latin American bioethics has been, to an important extent, parochial and unable to meet stringent international standards of rational philosophical discussion. The new generations of bioethicists are changing this situation, and this book demonstrates that change. All articles are written from the perspective of Latin American scholars from several disciplines such as philosophy and law. Working with the tools of analytical philosophy and jurisprudence, this book defends views with rational argument, and opening for pluralistic discussion.

En “Contract Law and Distributive Justice”, Anthony Kronman sostiene que la voluntariedad en los contratos debe entenderse completamente en base a una concepción de la justicia distributiva. En este ensayo me propongo cuestionar la tesis distributiva de Kronman. El problema central de tal tesis es que entiende a la interacción contractual entre las partes meramente como un medio para promover la justicia distributiva. Mi tesis es que, por tal razón, tal teoría no da cuenta de algunos aspectos centrales del derecho de los contratos tales como el efecto relativo de los contratos y el rol central del consentimiento.

This paper explores the following question: if, as John Rawls famously suggests, justice is the first virtue of social institutions, how are we to understand the institution of contract law? On the one hand, many writers take the view that the rules of contracts are merely a tool for bringing about distributive justice; on the other hand, some libertarian writers contend that the rules of contract leave no space for any idea of distributive justice. In this paper, I propose an alternative account. I situate contract law in terms of what John Rawls calls “the social division of responsibility”: society as a whole has to provide individuals with an adequate share of opportunities and resources that they need in order to set and pursue their own conception of the good. Once individuals have those fair shares, citizens have to take responsibility for how their own lives go. An important way that people may pursue their plans is by entering into arrangements with others. This requires a system of contract rules. I argue that justice requires that we understand contract rules in terms of the idea of fair terms of interaction – that is, terms that would be accepted by reasonable persons moved by a desire for a social world in which they, as free and equal, can cooperate with others on terms they accept. The underlying idea is that of reciprocity, that is, the idea that individuals should not set the terms of their interactions with others unilaterally. Those fair terms of interaction are reasonable terms. Thus, in this paper, I claim that contractual interactions should be approached from the perspective of the reasonable person. My aim is to explain the formation of a contract, the legal response to a breach, and other issues that come up with contractual interactions from that perspective.