Human Dignity and Bioethics

36 | F. Daniel Davis
24
For an account of the influence of the Belmont principles on clinical practice,
see Eric J. Cassell’s “The Principles of the Belmont Report: How Have Respect for
Persons, Beneficence, and Justice Been Applied in Clinical Medicine,” in Belmont
Revisited, pp. 77-95.
25
Paul Ramsey, The Patient as Person: Explorations in Medical Ethics, 2nd ed. (New
Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2002).
26
Fletcher developed these views of personhood and humanity in a series of influential
books and articles, including his Morals and Medicine (Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1954) and, later, his Humanhood: Essays in Biomedical
Ethics (Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1979).
27
See, for example, Singer’s Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional
Ethics (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994). With respect to Catholic moral theology,
see Pope John Paul II’s encyclical, Evangelium vitae (1995), available online at
www.vatican.va/edocs/eng0141/_index.htm.
28
Two of the more compelling expositions of this argument about the relationship
between the Belmont principle of respect for persons and the principle of respect
for autonomy are made by M. Therese Lysaught (see her “Respect: Or, How Respect
for Persons Became Respect for Autonomy,” in The Journal of Medicine and
Philosophy 29 [2004]: 665-680) and by Karen Lebacqz, a former member of the
National Commission (see her “We Sure Are Older But Are We Wiser?” in Belmont
Revisited, pp. 99-110).
29
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. John M.
Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977 [1859]), vol. XVIII.
30
For a thorough, sustained critique of the prevalence of autonomy in American
bioethics and society, see Willard Gaylin and Bruce Jennings, The Perversion of Autonomy:
Coercion and Constraints in a Liberal Society, revised and expanded edition
(Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2003).
31
All of the Council’s published reports can be found online at www.bioethics.gov/
reports/.