Conservative bioethics

"How did the United States, the world's scientific powerhouse, reach a point at which it grapples with the ethical challenges of twenty-first-century biomedicine using Bible stories, Catholic doctrine, and woolly rabbinical allegory?"

Conservative bioethics' latest, most dangerous ploy

The Stupidity of Dignity by Steven Pinker

"...what's not to like? The advances do not raise the traditional concerns of bioethics, which focuses on potential harm and coercion of patients or research subjects. What, then, are the ethical concerns that call for a presidential council?"

"...The general feeling is that, even if a new technology would improve life and health and decrease suffering and waste, it might have to be rejected, or even outlawed, if it affronted human dignity.

Whatever that is. The problem is that "dignity" is a squishy, subjective notion, hardly up to the heavyweight moral demands assigned to it."

This volume of 28 essays and commentaries by Council members and invited contributors is their deliverable, addressed directly to President Bush. The report does not, the editors admit, settle the question of what dignity is or how it should guide our policies. It does, however, reveal a great deal about the approach to bioethics represented by the Council. And what it reveals should alarm anyone concerned with American biomedicine and its promise to improve human welfare. For this government-sponsored bioethics does not want medical practice to maximize health and flourishing; it considers that quest to be a bad thing, not a good thing."

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.ht...7-f5059cd0bfbd

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Right wing intelligence on display here: http://www.usmessageboard.com/the-fl...st7235230.html

Observations from an old crank who happens to have lived long enough - to have done lots - to know just a bit about what is good about what is.

"Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority." Eric Hoffer

Her's a good plan ... let the world worry about itself and we get rid of this bleeding heart bullshit we've been fed by those who don't ever seem to be doing without while they bleed everyone else dry.

You lefties whine and cry about poverty in this nation and the level of education and lack of healthcare and blah, blah, blah while you send billions in freebies overseas.

We need to take care of our own first and you people lost in your ideals that have not a damned thing to do with reality need to either wake up or shut up. Either works for me.

I was born in the 80's. you both sound stupid to me

That's because the people who had you in the 80s were doing drugs, dear, and it affected you.

I don't see how lefties consider killing babies, and allowing people to decide for their loved ones whether or not to keep them on life support, as life-affirming behavior, myself. And that's what this comes down to.