Professor Deirdre Madden:

What I am asking is this: if we decide that the ethical debates should take precedence, whose ethics should we adopt? There are different views on this. Obviously, as the committee has heard so far, there are lots of different ethical grey areas and there are different views on this. What I am saying is that the views of the medical profession should not necessarily be the predominant view regarding the ethical debate. Up until around the 1960s, medical ethics was predominantly the purview of the medical profession. I do not think this is the case anymore. I think ethics is far broader than that and takes into account the views of ethicists, lawyers, patient advocates and so on. Ethical debates certainly influence the way of thinking about what the law should be because they influence public thinking and influence academic argument, which in turn influences judicial thinking, but I do not think that medical ethics should be the determining factor.