The Future of the Sanctity of Life

- Balancing Progress, Rights, and Responsibility

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-555-3_11How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Sanctity of life; human dignity; positive obligations; preventable mortality; governance and accountability

Abstract

This paper seeks to re-examines the sanctity of life ideal as a practical standard for governing contemporary risks to life, rather than as a theological claim or an absolute prohibition. It argues that late-modern controversies, such as end-of-life decision-making, health-system constraints, climate-related mortality, disaster governance, as well as high-risk technologies such as advanced AI and bioengineering, reveal a persistent implementation gap. Here ethical commitments are affirmed, whilst institutional capacity, governance arrangements, and enforceable legal duties fail to translate these same commitments into protections at scale. For the purpose of addressing this gap, this paper presents an integrative framework of nested layers. These include ethics, governance, and law, hereby linking justificatory reasoning and side-constraints to collective capability, and then to justiciable obligations, including positive duties to protect life and procedural duties to investigate avoidable deaths. It also reframes “sanctity of life” within a pluralist justificatory space, in which dignity, vulnerability, and distributive justice inform priorities in preventable mortality. This includes both structural violence as well as inequality-driven loss of life. Building on these foundations, the paper proposes a four-stage decision-and-design test for hard cases that specifies: (1) the life-risk baseline and affected populations, (2) capability and resource feasibility, (3) legal accountability pathways, and (4) iterative review through transparency and oversight. The result is a disciplined route from value to enforcement that supports proportionate innovation governance and prevention.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Mohammed Abdel-Haq
AU  - Alicia Danielsson
AU  - Amit Anand
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/03/13
TI  - The Future of the Sanctity of Life
BT  - Proceeding of The Future of Life - Legal, Scientific, and Geopolitical Challenges (TFOL2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 153
EP  - 175
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-555-3_11
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-555-3_11
ID  - Abdel-Haq2026
ER  -