Mark Frank
Posts: 46
Joined: May 2006
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I tried backing you up thus:
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I have access to the paper and want to support Waterbear. Nowhere in the paper does Cochrane give his view of the rights and wrongs of anything. That’s not what the paper is about. It is about the practicalities of using the concept of dignity in bioethics. He looks at many senses of the word “dignity” and finds different problems in making use of them in bioethics. I guess the sense you are focussing on is “dignity as inherent moral worth”. He points out that this concept only makes sense in the Christian religious tradition. His reason for dismissing it for use in bioethics is:
But while this conception of dignity now makes sense, it only does so by being grounded in extremely controversial claims that not all individuals can reasonably be expected to accept. It is impossible to prove that human beings do stand in this special relationship with God; and it is also something that many people, due to different religious views or the absence of any religious view, reject out of hand. We would surely be wise to avoid using an understanding of dignity that rests on such controversial premises. And this is especially true when addressing the often complex and contested issues in bioethics.
In your quote you note that he says that some people use this concept of dignity to prevent actions that may do great harm to human beings such as medical experiments. But that does not mean that he supports such experiments or that this is the reason he objects to the using the concept of dignity in bioethics. It is simply explaining how this concept of dignity is used. |
However, being in moderation the comment may not appear for a long time, if at all.
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