University of Miami

Fred M. Frohock (Ph.D., Political Science and Philosophy, Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is professor and chair of political science at the University of Miami with academic concentrations in political philosophy, law, and bioethics. He is the author of ten books and numerous papers, reviews, and articles in scholarly journals that include The American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Political Studies, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Journal of Religion, Religion, Polity, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, and Social Theory and Practice. His latest book, Bounded Divinities: Sacred Discourses in Pluralist Democracies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, September 2006), is a treatment of religion and politics that uses Santería as a case study in a general theoretical examination of the two practices. His work often combines theory and field work. Special Care is an ethnographic account of decision making in an intensive care neonatal nursery (University of Chicago Press, 1986). In 1992 he published Healing Powers (University of Chicago Press), a study of alternative medicine and spiritual healing. Public Reason: Mediated Authority in the Liberal State (Cornell University Press, 1999) delineates public reasoning on post-Wittgenstein theories of language. Lives of the Psychics (University of Chicago Press, 2000), examines anomalous and mystical experiences. At this time Frohock is working on a book that critically scans the evidence for life after death and the implications of beliefs in an after life for political regimes (University of Kansas Press). He has twice been a Social Science Research Council Fellow, served for eight years on the University Hospital Ethics Committee in Syracuse, NY, and was one of the founders and vice presidents of the Institute for Ethics in Health Care, a nonprofit institute that served central New York for almost a decade. In 2002 he was awarded a Chancellor’s Citation by Syracuse University for Exceptional Academic Achievement.

Perhaps because we live in a time when rights are the most favored vocabularies in negotiating issues and constructing institutions, at least in the West, it is easy to miss limits on the powers of rights to do any of the things expected in their use.  There are two such limits.  In the simplest sense rights can conflict with each other.  But rights, like all terms, also require a set of conditions within which they are intelligible (have a coherent sense and reference), outside of which they are not.  These are limits of scope, not those resulting from conflicts among rights all of which are valid.  The complex phenomena presented in bioethics are perhaps the most vivid demonstrations of limits in scope.  In this paper I argue that rights vocabularies do not refer successfully to inchoate forms of life and that attempts to assign rights to human embryos create a false conflict between the rights of embryonic life and the human rights of sentient life to secure the benefits of stem cell research.  In these areas the epistemic dominance of human rights shifts the playing field.  The source of moral guidance in stem cell research is the set of needs in the human community, arguable the oldest moral map in history.  This map is adequately delineated in the language of human rights.  I conclude that stem cell research should proceed in order to provide the spectacular benefits to humanity that the scientific community anticipates. (Download PDF of the paper)