If We’re Just Matter, Why Do We Matter? The Crisis of Human Dignity with Dr. Ashley Fernandes
Originally published at Bioethics Babe- Categories
- Bioethics
If we’re just matter, why do we matter? Modern bioethics is built on a question most people never stop to ask: What is a human being?
Because the answer to that question isn’t abstract, it determines how we treat the most vulnerable people among us. From IVF and embryo selection, to assisted suicide and end-of-life care, to gene editing and transhumanism. We are already making decisions about who counts and who doesn’t.
In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Ashley Fernandes, a physician, bioethicist, Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and the Associate Director of the Center for Bioethics at the Ohio State University, College of Medicine — to expose the deeper philosophical divide shaping modern medicine:
- Materialism: where the human person is reduced to biology, function, and preference
- Personalism: where dignity is intrinsic, unchanging, and grounded in who we are
If dignity depends on intelligence, autonomy, or capacity, what happens to pre-born babies, disabled people, elderly people, and those who suffer?
And if medicine can do more than ever before, who decides what it should do?
This conversation goes beyond politics and policy to the foundation beneath it all:
- Are human rights real or just a useful fiction?
- Can science explain human dignity or only describe the body?
- What does it mean to treat someone as a person and not a problem?
Because if we get the human person wrong, everything else unravels.
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