Prof. Dr. Peter Dabrock

Short CV

PETER DABROCK (*July 24, 1964) is Professor of Systematic Theology (Ethics) at the Department of Theology of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg since 2010 and was Chairman of the German Ethics Council from 2016 until recently. His research focuses on the ethics of technical and (bio)scientific interference with human life forms (from germ line intervention to AI). He is particularly interested in questions of social justice, human dignity and corporality.
From 2002 to 2008, he was Junior Professor of Bioethics at the Philipps University of Marburg, where he was also Professor of Social Ethics until 2010; he declined a call to the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2015. In addition, he was a member of the Central Ethics Committee of the German Medical Association from 2004 to 2013 and a member of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies from 2011 to 2016. In 2011, he was ordained pastor (honorary) of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria; from 2012-2020 he was a board member of the German Ethics Council. From 2014 to 2021, Dabrock was member of the Kammer für Öffentliche Verantwortung (‘Chamber for Public Responsibility’) of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), since 2022 member of the Steuerungsboard des Kammernetzwerkes of the EKD. In 2017, he was the first theologian to become a full member of Acatech, the German Academy of Science and Engineering, and in 2022 he was elected to its executive board. In 2021, the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels appointed him to the Stiftungsrat (‘Foundations Board of Trustees’) of the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (‘Peace Prize of the German Book Trade’), which he was a member of until 2022. From 2022 to 2024, Dabrock has been the spokesperson for the Department of Protestant Theology and Vice Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. He is co-editor of the “Zeitschrift für Evangelische Ethik” and has published numerous books and articles.

Main field of research

• social justice
• ethics of health care
• concepts of human dignity in bioethics
• ethics of human genomics (research with human embryonic stem cells, PGD, so called “therapeutic cloning”, ethical implications of genetic findings for obesity, bio-databases)
• ethics of synthetic biology
• theological understanding of Leiblichkeit (bodiliness)
• conceptual questions at the interface of science, technology and society (bio-objects and bio-subjects)
• health and sickness
• meta-ethical questions in a perspective of foundational theology
• system theory