Dignity, not utility, must govern bioethics, law students told

Published: 2008-04-25

STANFORD, Calif. (CNS) -- Human dignity rises above all other considerations in biomedical research and health care and must govern ethical decisions in the lab and at the bedside, Dr. Edmund Pellegrino, the chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, told Stanford University law students April 9. Pellegrino spoke about the council's newly published anthology, "Human Dignity and Bioethics." The book is a response to critics who have complained that dignity is both too vague a standard and too theologically oriented to have a place in bioethics. Addressing students in a classroom at Stanford Law School, Pellegrino made a forceful claim for the inescapability of dignity -- the lived experience of being human -- for anyone making ethical choices in research, in the clinic and in general biology. "Wherever you start, wherever you go, you'll have to come back to either accepting the notion or denying it utterly, and then we can weigh out for you the implications of denying that to a human being," he said.

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