TFL Vsebine / Revija Revus

Pred dobrim letom dni je svet za bioetiko tedanjega predsednika ZDA izdal zbornik esejev različnih avtorjev, katerih cilj je analizirati pomen in vlogo človekovega dostojanstva v sodobnih bioetiških razpravah. Čeprav knjiga vsebuje nekaj pomembnih izvirnih prispevkov, pa je vtis zbornika kot celote precej skažen zaradi nesorazmernega poudarjanja verskih (predvsem krščanskih) razlag izvora koncepta dostojanstva ter njegove vloge pri spornih temah s področij sodobne medicine in biotehnologije.

The last publication of the President’s Council for Bioethics, Human Dignity and Bioethics, is a compilation of essays written by authors whose aim it was to analyze the role of human dignity in controversial bioethical debates. Despite some important contributions, the impression of the collection as a whole is tainted by a disproportional presence of religious accounts regarding the sources of the concept of dignity and their implications for controversial topics in bioethics. I single out a few contributions that I find worthwhile (notably those provided by professors Martha Nussbaum, Daniel Dennett, Patricia Churchland, Susan Shell, Rebecca Dresser, and Edmund Pellegrino), but I conclude that even these essays don’t help shake the sense that the collection is devoted too much to the discussions of the possibility of secular ethics (and thus secular understanding of bioethics); the result is that this volume, with a few notable exceptions, offers much too little on its professed topic: the meaning and the role of the concept of human dignity with respect to ethical issues in modern medicine and biotechnology.