Individual Rights and Social Welfare: The Emerging Legal Issues

On Individual and Social Rights

The debate about the status and purpose of individual rights as against social rights depends a great deal on how we define these terms. Although it is difficult to come to a definitive philosophical or jurisprudential conclusion about social versus individual rights, textbooks on human rights recognize the difference between the two traditions (Gearon 2003). Furthermore, the difference between...

Individual rights and social justice.

The social welfare function and individual responsibility: some theoretical issues and empirical evidence.

The literature on income distribution has attempted to evaluate different degrees of inequality using a social welfare function (SWF) approach. However, it has largely ignored the source of such inequalities, and has thus failed to consider different degrees of inequity. The literature on egalitarianism has addressed issues of equity, largely in relation to individual responsibility. This paper...

Social Choice of Individual and Group Rights

Individual rights can generally be respected if and, except in rare special cases, only if they apply to independent components of a Cartesian product space of social states, and also each individual is indifferent to how others exercise their rights. This is true whether or not the Pareto criterion is satisfied. Group rights can also be respected if they apply to the independent components for...

Noninvasive Prenatal Genetic Testing: Current and Emerging Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues.

Noninvasive prenatal genetic testing (NIPT) for chromosomal aneuploidy involving the analysis of cell-free fetal DNA became commercially available in 2011. The low false-positive rate of NIPT, which reduces unnecessary prenatal invasive diagnostic procedures, has led to broad clinician and patient adoption. We discuss the ethical, legal, and social issues raised by rapid and global disseminatio...