Abstract

The bioethical language in the Berlin Republic was initially shaped by the central topoi of the Council of Europe's Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine. This debate on the pros and cons of this authoritative bioethical convention, which was also conducted intensively in the German public sphere and has not yet been signed by Germany, was followed in 2001 by numerous statements, initially from the National Ethics Council (NER) and, from 2009, from the German Ethics Council (DER). These statements mark, in a sense, seismic crystallization points and the verbalization of bioethical debates in Germany: the moral status of human beings, the right to selfdetermination as a direct consequence of human dignity, and the self-image of human beings in their relationship to machines (AI) or to non-human animals and to the planetary whole. These crystallization points are at the heart of the following outline.