Human dignity and bioethics
Human dignity and bioethics

Summary/Abstract: The author presents and thoroughly analyzes the Convention of Oviedo for the protection of human rights and dignity of the human being with regard to the application of biology and medicine, an international legal instrument taking into account the various ethical, social and legal aspects of their impact. The basic idea to be found in the international documents devoted to the defence of Man's dignity, as an individual and as a species, is that the development of biology and the correlated sciences should primarily be done in the service of Man and only secondly in the service of science. The recent developments in the field of biomedical sciences and technologies tend to confer Man an immediate and uncontrolled power of managing his own biologic individuality with major risks for the universal and defining values of the human being. Bioethics is a new field that emerged in parallel with the huge step forward made by biomedical sciences in the last decades of the previous century. For a long time it has mainly been concerned with the technological developments in medicine while neglecting the moral and the legal aspects. At present, specialists in medicine, law, ethics, etc., take efforts to reconcile the technological evolution in medicine, particularly in the field of genetics, with the personality of the patient, who is a set of several „tissues" but a soul as well, with public control upon the development of genetic technologies, with the physician's uncontrolled power, with the profit making vs. the moral criteria, and with the legal norms. The weight each of these has at one moment or another in the evolution of society can lead to changes that may result in a loss of society's balance, which is quite fragile anyway. It is the present solutions – moral and legal – to the challenges raised by the biomedical sciences and technologies that the future of mankind and ultimately the future of the human species depends on.

• Details
• Contents