Technological change and the growth of technocratic approaches to government have gone hand-in-hand with the development of secular transhumanism in the West. The result is a perfect storm for the onset of cultural or “soft” totalitarianism in what during the Cold War was known as the “Free World.” Accelerating political opposition to traditional and biological definitions of sex, and to traditional marriage and family networks in Christian contexts, has undermined anthropological and value assumptions basic to self-government. Paradoxically, in this post-Cold (...) War environment, Russian culture now provides a model for renewing the Christian understanding of sex related to defining freedom as self-restraint. Specifically, that model is that of the Russian Orthodox Christian anthropology of sex and its related theological tradition. (shrink)

This special thematic issue of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy brings together a cross-cultural set of scholars from Asia, Europe, and North America critically to explore foundational questions of familial authority and the implications of such findings for organ procurement policies designed to increase access to transplantation. The substantial disparity between the available supply of human organs and demand for organ transplantation creates significant pressure to manipulate public policy to increase organ procurement. As the articles in this issue explore, (...) however, even if well intentioned, the desire to maximize organ procurement does not justify undermining foundational elements of human flourishing, such as the family. While defending at times quite different understandings of autonomy, informed consent, and familial authority, each author makes clear that a principled appreciation of the family is necessary. Otherwise, health care practice will treat the family in a cynical and instrumental fashion unlikely to support social or individual good. (shrink)

After a period during which the theological categories of sin and forgiveness were ignored or trivialized, presently these notions are being rediscovered. What could their impact be on bioethics, either in the narrow sense of medical ethics, or in the more encompassing sense of the ethics of the life sciences? This essay begins with describing the processes of transcending and ethitization, which gave rise to the biblical notion of sin. It portrays the theological foundation of sin in terms of a (...) twofold refusal of proper relations to God and other humans. Through the practise of confession in the face of God (coram deo), sin is placed into a horizon of hope for forgiveness and reconciliation. The heuristic and hermeneutical significance of these categories results from their introducing a “surplus value,” which transcends biological and ethical considerations. This additional dimension is illustrated in view of care (cura) for the injured, and in view of individual as well as collective willingness to forgive. (shrink)

This essay begins by distinguishing among the viewpoints of philosophy, theology, and religion; it then explores how each deals with “sin” in the bioethical context. The conclusions are that the philosophical and theological viewpoints are intellectually defective in that they cripple our ability to deal with normative issues, and are in the end unable to integrate Christian concepts like “sin” successfully into bioethics. Sin is predicated only of beings with free will, though only in Western Christianity must all sins be (...) committed with knowledge and voluntarily. Without the notions of free will, sin, and a narrative of redemption, bioethics remains unable to provide itself with an adequate normative framework. Bioethics, and morality in general, remain a morass precisely because there has been a failure to translate Christian morality into fully secular and scientistic terms. (shrink)

Roman Catholic healthcare institutions in the United States face a number of threats to the integrity of their missions, including the increasing religious and moral pluralism of society and the financial crisis many organizations face. These organizations in the United States often have fought fervently to avoid being obligated to provide interventions they deem intrinsically immoral, such as abortion. Such institutions no doubt have made numerous accommodations and changes in how they operate in response to the growing pluralism of our (...) society, but they have resisted crossing certain lines and providing particular interventions deemed objectively wrong. Catholic hospitals in Belgium have responded differently to pluralism. In response to a growing diversity of moral views and to the Belgian Act of Euthanasia of 2002, Catholic hospitals in Belgium now engage in euthanasia. This essay examines a defense that has been offered of this practice of euthanasia in Catholic hospitals and argues that it is misguided. (shrink)

This article examines Leon Kass's contention that a choice for physician-assisted suicide is “undignified.” Although Kass is Jewish rather than Christian, he argues for positions that most Christians share, and he argues for these positions without presupposing the truth of specific religious claims. I argue that although Kass has some important intuitions, he too readily assumes that these intuitions will be shared by his audience, and that this assumption diminishes the force of his argument. An examination of the limitations of (...) Kass's argument is helpful insofar as it illustrates the real challenge faced by religious believers who wish to defend their beliefs in the “public forum.” For it illustrates that what needs to be made “accessible” is the Judeo-Christian understanding of man and his place in the world. While I do not wish to claim that this task is impossible, I do think that it is far more difficult than most realize. Like all important tasks, however, unless we wrestle with the difficulties it raises, our arguments will strike many as unconvincing. (shrink)

Many people look to religion to help resolve the serious moral and legal issues associated with assisted reproductive technologies. Doing so presupposes that religion is the cornerstone of ethics, but this assumption is not well founded. While various faiths are entitled to articulate their views on matters of human reproduction, the contradictions involved in doing so make it unwise to rely on religion in the formulation of law and policy. These contradictions – such as the indeterminacy about what revealed truths (...) means – make moral secular philosophy a better guide for the protection of human welfare. (shrink)

The substantive center of Christian ethics is Jesus’s ministry of the kingdom or reign of God, and its preferential inclusion of the poor, the outcast, and the sinner. What defines a gospel-based bioethics is a hopeful, practical commitment to improve the health of those who are most vulnerable to illness and early death because they lack basic needs. This commitment is distinctive of Christian bioethics, if not “unique” in the sense that no other bioethical approaches or traditions share it. To (...) succeed in reducing disparities in access to health care requires cooperative social action with members of multiple moral and political communities, meaning that there is no strict boundary between secular and Christian bioethics at the practical, political level, the level of applied Christian social ethics. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the challenge European states have imposed on themselves, namely, to provide state-of-the-art health care equally to all and for less than market price. Continued endorsement of that challenge in these states hinges on their character as media democracies: the public is moved by a supposed morally warranted expectation that all should receive adequate health care at no significant personal cost. The structural and economic constraints that hamper such forms of healthcare delivery result in systems that are (...) financially inefficient and fail to provide the quality of treatment patients are led to expect. This essay examines the tension between secular moral claims to social solidarity and the actual limits of accessibility to healthcare services. Its critical focus addresses both the difficulties that result from politicians invoking high moral ideals while framing their decisions around short-term political advantage, and the transformation of the Enlightenment’s secular aspirations into a political ideology that distorts such moral ideals. This essay concludes that the commitments to very particular notions of equality and human dignity, which frame contemporary Europe’s provision of publicly subsidized health care, have given rise to a governance that is morally incoherent and unsustainable. This failure of public health care in Europe can thus be read as one more belated manifestation of the epistemological and moral failure of the Enlightenment’s secularizing project, a failure which should invite contemporary Europeans to honestly face the moral challenge of postmodernity. (shrink)

Given intractable secular moral pluralism, the force and significance of the four principles (autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice) of Tom Beauchamp and James Childress must be critically re-considered. This essay examines the history of the articulation of these four principles of bioethics, showing why initially there was an illusion of a common morality that led many to hold that the principles could give guidance across cultures. But there is no one sense of the content or the theoretical justification of these (...) principles. In addition, a wide range of secular moral and bioethical choices has been demoralized into lifestyle choices; the force of the secular moral point of view has also been deflated, thus compounding moral pluralism. It is the political generation of the principles that provides a common morality in the sense of an established morality. The principles are best understood as embedded not in a common morality, sensu stricto, but in that morality that is established at law and public policy in a particular polity. Although moral pluralism is substantive and intractable at the level of moral content, in a particular polity a particular morality and a particular bioethics can be established, regarding which health care ethics consultants can be experts. Public morality and bioethics are at their roots a political reality. (shrink)

One of the lamentable characteristics of our contemporary age is the way in which abortion has been adopted as a natural part of the culture. This essay describes this adoption as a symptom of that culture’s profound de-Christianization. As that culture sheds its once Christian commitments, persons change the way in which they relate to their body in its sexually differentiated physiology, its physical drives and impulses. They refashion their sense of human flourishing, their vision of women’s social role, the (...) value they place on education, career, and economic well-being, and their understanding of reproductive responsibility. This de-Christianization is not sufficiently appreciated in a nominally still “Christian culture.” Such blindness reflects an inability to distinguish Christian commitments from moral commitments, which, although framed in terms that are compatible with Christian meanings, are equally open to meanings affirming the idolatry informing secular humanism. De-Christianization is not the same as de-moralization. This essay explores the way in which the new moral norms about sexuality, about education and career opportunities for women, authority within marriage, the role of this-worldly well-being and human suffering all contribute to our culture’s complacency in view of abortion. The underlying concern is to illustrate how a morality (even a morality of human sympathy and solidarity) that is not anchored in a genuine Tradition-affirming Christian conduct of life leads away from Christ, and how only a return to that conduct can heal our “culture of death.”. (shrink)

Abortion has become such an indispensable part of contemporary experience that even Christians sometimes find it difficult to oppose. Since taking the life in utero has ceased to be regarded as a grave sin and is not always recognized as an unmitigated evil, those who wish to remain faithful to the Word of God struggle to find ways of speaking against killing of the unborn. Some of them, like Erika Bachiochi, seek to beat modern culture at its own game, by (...) representing Catholic teaching on human sexuality as a “right kind” of feminism. However, in her appeal to secular rationality, foregoing the metaphysical commitments of faith and replacing them with the consequentialist reasoning and data from scientific research, she thereby renders her alternative unviable and un-Christian. In response to this failure, I would like to present some Orthodox Christian considerations pointing toward a more wholesome and consistent way forward. (shrink)

Unlike (especially) the various Protestantisms, Orthodox Christianity recognizes no fundamentally different problems in the development and (future) application of human germ line genetic engineering (HGGE) than those raised by more traditional medicine. The particular challenges which frame the life of a traditional Christian arise not only in view of “groundbreaking” technological progress and its attendant increase in human power over nature, but permeate already his most simple daily routines. The diverse post-traditional Christianities have ceased confronting such liturgical–ascetical challenges. The quite (...) appropriately pious desire, among those committed to such Christianities, for some restraint in the face of such increase of power therefore gets refocused onto substitute concerns. The new challenge then arises to establish the universal validity of the moral norms underlying such concerns in order to ground the desired prohibition. The discussions of several such norms offered in this issue of Christian Bioethics illustrate the embarrassment presented by the unavailability of either theological or rational foundations needed for such a project. The attempt to prove that there is something in principle morally wrong about HGGE is thus not only unnecessary for the Christian conduct of life (and presents a distraction), but also doomed to fail. (shrink)

In this paper, I assess Peter Dabrock's “Drawing distinctions responsibly and concretely: A European Protestant perspective on foundational theological bioethics.” I explore the ways in which Dabrock announces nontraditional Christian assumptions to guide Christian bioethics, engages the secular bioethical agenda on the very terms set by and congenial to the field of secular bioethics, and searches for insights from philosophy and science through which to recast Christian moral judgments. For example, he cites approvingly, as if they were expressive of Christian (...) moral concerns: human rights, democracy, and state-based social redistribution of resources to satisfy welfare entitlements. In this short essay, I argue that Dabrock has unduly limited the role of Traditional Christian theology to guide bioethics and, consequently, has also wrongly characterized the Christian moral life and Christian social/political obligations. (shrink)

This essay takes a Traditional Christian, that is, Orthodox look at the integration of psychotherapy into pastoral counseling, as endorsed by many Western mainline Christianities. It examines how the Christian pastor can guide his sheep through the bioethical problems they encounter in their pursuit of salvation. The first part explores whether the turn to psychology and psychotherapy can be welcomed as a return to the Traditional therapeutic understanding of theology and of the Church as a spiritual hospital for fallen souls. (...) The second part examines two typical ways in which non-Orthodox Christianities embrace psychotherapy in pastoral counseling, as directed to unburdening parishioners from their doubts about bioethical decision making in the context of a Christian life. This part highlights the theological assumptions (about the pastor, his care, and the notion of God informing both) framing that embrace and shows them to be incompatible with the Traditional commitment to man's Divine vocation. The turn to psychotherapy here, rather than inaugurating a return to the therapeutic spirit of Traditional theology, offers a secularized substitute. The third part investigates the possibility of a Traditional Christian way of practicing psychotherapy along with its significance for Orthodox pastoral care in bioethical counseling. Here it becomes clear that, even beyond incompatible theological assumptions, already psychotherapy's endorsement of a predominantly discursive approach to healing is alien to Traditional pastoral care. (shrink)

Once God is no longer recognized as the ground and the enforcer of morality, the character and force of morality undergoes a significant change, a point made by G.E.M. Anscombe in her observation that without God the significance of morality is changed, as the word criminal would be changed if there were no criminal law and criminal courts. There is no longer in principle a God's-eye perspective from which one can envisage setting moral pluralism aside. In addition, it becomes impossible (...) to show that morality should always trump concerns of prudence, concerns for one's own non-moral interests and the interests of those to whom one is close. Immanuel Kant's attempt to maintain the unity of morality and the force of moral obligation by invoking the idea of God and the postulates of pure practical reason are explored and assessed. Hegel's reconstruction of the status of moral obligation is also examined, given his attempt to eschew Kant's thing-in-itself, as well as Kant's at least possible transcendent God. Severed from any metaphysical anchor, morality gains a contingent content from socio-historical context and its enforcement from the state. Hegel's disengagement from a transcendent God marks a watershed in the place of God in philosophical reflections regarding the status of moral obligations on the European continent. Anscombe is vindicated. Absent the presence of God, there is an important change in the force of moral obligation. (shrink)

One of the most significant and persistent debates in secular clinical ethics is the question of ethics expertise, which asks whether ethicists can make justified moral recommendations in active patient cases. A critical point of contention in the ethics expertise debate is whether there is, in fact, a bioethical consensus upon which secular ethicists can ground their recommendations and whether there is, in principle, a way of justifying such a consensus in a morally pluralistic context. In a series of recent (...) articles in this journal, Janet Malek defends a positive view of ethics expertise, claiming that secular ethicists should comport their recommendations with bioethical consensus. In response, Nick Colgrove and Kelly Kate Evans deny the existence of a secular bioethical consensus; question why, even if it did exist, consensus should be considered a reliable way of resolving bioethical questions; and recommend a friendlier approach to clinical ethics based on the thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr. In this article, I respond to Colgrove and Evans on all three points. In part one, I show there is a secular bioethical consensus but note it could be better consolidated and created through a more systematic and inclusive process. In part two, I argue that bioethical consensus is morally justified but note that this justification cannot be plausibly based upon claims that it only invokes moral principles available to or shared by all. In part three, I argue Engelhardt’s approach cannot be described as “friendlier” to clinical ethics because it is incompatible with many current healthcare laws and policies. (shrink)

In The Foundations of Bioethics, former senior editor of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. radically reassessed the nature and scope of bioethics, as well as the possibilities for this still-young field that he helped found, in light of the prevailing sociohistorical context, which he argued had been inadequately considered by bioethicists. This issue of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy provides a snapshot of how bioethics is developing in the wake of Engelhardt’s critique. Topics covered (...) include the relation between rule of law and US healthcare policy, the relation between autonomy and consent, the role of rights in bioethical discourse, the debate between naturalism and normativism in the theory of disease, and the question of when human individuals begin to exist. Although no single theme explicitly unites them, the papers in this issue were produced within and are fruitfully read in terms of what Engelhardt influentially characterized as a morally pluralistic postmodernity subsisting amidst the ruins of tradition. In the conclusion, I introduce a further wrinkle into this Engelhardtian picture—namely, the looming danger of a more general epistemological pluralism effected by new technologies like Deepfakes. (shrink)

The views on in vitro fertilization within Russian Orthodox Christian society are diverse. One reason for that variation is the ambiguity found in “The Basis of the Social Concept,” the document issued in 2000 by the Russian Orthodox Church and considered to be the primary guidelines for determining the Church’s stance on bioethics. This essay explores how the treatment of infertility reconciles with the Orthodox Christian faith and what methods of medical assistance for infertility may be appropriate for Orthodox Christians. (...) The focus here is on IVF because it is among the most widely used methods to overcome childlessness, and the permissibility of IVF is the object of disagreement among Orthodox. The article defines criteria that can help to discern what is absolutely wrong and must be avoided from what only falls short of the mark, but not very far, for Orthodox Christians. If treatment of the underlying causes of infertility has failed or promises no hope and a husband and a wife do not feel able to carry the Cross of infertility, then from pastoral dispensation they might be blessed to use ethically acceptable variants of IVF. IVF has many variants that are different in their spiritual influence on a person. Orthodox Christians pursuing IVF should seek spiritual guidance and a blessing to pursue IVF. They must not form more embryos than will be transferred in the same cycle. Freezing, discarding, or reduction of embryos is forbidden. Infertile couples ought to use only their reproductive cells. The use of donor gametes is unacceptable. Any embryo formed ought to be transferred into the wife’s womb, and the use of surrogates is impermissible. Only a husband and wife who are able to maintain their marital union and where the wife is still of childbearing age should be blessed to use IVF. (shrink)

Decision-making in health care is often challenging and therefore requires practical wisdom. The domains of such wisdom involve goals, perception, ethics, deliberation, and motivation. For Christian patients, there is a need for practical wisdom founded on Christian commitments that shape and guide these domains according to a Christian understanding of life, health, technology, illness, suffering, and death. In this essay, I outline a Christian approach to practical wisdom in health care by infusing Christian beliefs and values into a general framework (...) for practical wisdom in medicine I have described previously. I organize this approach by referring to Christian purpose, vision, ethics, piety, and practice. The result is a framework that intends to integrate faith and reason so that what we believe as Christians forms how we think about health and guides what we choose or decline when considering the possibilities that come before us in health care. (shrink)

Mark J. Cherry; Searching for the Truly Human: Standing at the Precipice of a Post-Christian Age, Christian bioethics: Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical Moralit.

In general parlance the term sin has lost its existential meaning. Originally a Jewish-Christian term within a purely religious context, referring to a wrongdoing with regard to God, sin has slowly become reduced to guilt in the course of the secularization process. Guilt refers to a wrongdoing, especially with regard to fellow human beings. It also refers to errors of judgement with what can be tragic consequences. These errors can occur whenever human beings are called upon to act, including the (...) hospital environment. A Christian hospital has to address the issue of how to deal not only with guilt-ridden misdemeanors, but also with wrongdoing unto God, which overshadows every instance of guilt-ridden human behavior. Here, as in every parish, the Church Service is the place to acknowledge sin, confess sin, and forgive sin, beyond the boundaries of the parish itself. Article translated by Sarah L. Kirkby, B.A. Hons. (shrink)

Adequate response to physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia depends on fundamental philosophical and theological issues, including the character of an appropriate philosophically and theologically anchored anthropology, where the central element of traditional Christian anthropology is that humans are created to worship God. As I will argue, Christian morality and moral epistemology must be nested within and understood through this background Christian anthropology. As a result, I will argue that physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia can only be one-sidedly and inadequately appreciated through rational (...) appeal to central values, such as “human dignity” and “self-determination”, or through “sola scriptura” biblical interpretation, or individual judgments of conscience. Adequately addressing physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia will depend on a more fundamental spiritual-therapeutic approach. This cluster of moral, epistemological, anthropological, and bioethical claims will be explored by drawing on the texts of St. Basil the Great, St. Maximos the Confessor, and St. Isaac the Syrian. Their reflections on medicine, the human good, and its relationship to worship, spiritual therapy, and God will be used as a basis to indicate a broader philosophical perspective, which will be needed to avoid a one-sided, incomplete approach to the challenges of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. Medical morality, I argue, is best understood within categories that transcend the right, the good, the just, and the virtuous; namely, the holy. (shrink)

The American Society for Bioethics and the Humanities (ASBH) issued its Core Competencies for Health Care Ethics Consultation just as it is becoming ever clearer that secular ethics is intractably plural and without foundations in any reality that is not a social–historical construction (ASBH Core Competencies for Health Care Ethics Consultation , 2nd edn. American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, Glenview, IL, 2011 ). Core Competencies fails to recognize that the ethics of health care ethics consultants is not ethics in (...) the usual sense of a morally canonical ethics. Its ethics is the ethics established at law and in enforceable health care public policy in a particular jurisdiction. Its normativity is a legal normativity, so that the wrongness of violating this ethics is simply the legal penalties involved and the likelihood of their being imposed. That the ethics of ethics consultation is that ethics legally established accounts for the circumstance that the major role of hospital ethics consultants is as quasi-lawyers giving legal advice, aiding in risk management, and engaging in mediation. It also indicates why this collage of roles has succeeded so well. This article shows how moral philosophy as it was reborn in the 13th century West led to the ethics of modernity and then finally to the ethics of hospital ethics consultation. It provides a brief history of the emergence of an ethics that is after morality. Against this background, the significance of Core Competencies must be critically reconsidered. (shrink)

A truly Christian bioethics challenges the nature, substance, and application of secular morality, dividing Christians from non-Christians, accenting central moral differences, and providing content-full forthrightly Christian guidance for action. Consequently, Christian bioethics must be framed within the metaphysical and theological commitments of Traditional Christianity so as to provide proper orientation toward God. In contrast, secular bioethicists routinely present themselves as providing a universal bioethics acceptable to all reasonable and rational persons. Yet, such secular bioethicists habitually insert their own biases and (...) prejudices into their moral conclusions, ethical consultations, and political aspirations, without any real justification. As this article explores, the ideologically driven anti-Christian commitments, including commitments to human rights and social justice, embodied within contemporary bioethics routinely illustrate the increasing gap between the traditionally Christian and the devoutly secular, further deepening the culture wars. (shrink)

(2005). Between Morality and Repentance: Recapturing “Sin” for Bioethics. Christian Bioethics: Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 93-132.

In After God: Morality & Bioethics in a Secular Age, Professor H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. argues that the now dominant intellectual culture of the West actively shuns any transcendent point of orientation, such as an appeal to God or to a God’s eye perspective on reality. Instead, it seeks to frame its understanding of reality and morality, and thus its bioethics, without reference to any foundation outside of particular human concerns. This article explores the implications of living in a secular (...) culture that eschews any appeal to a fully objective perspective on reality. Drawing on Engelhardt’s analysis, it argues that absent access to a binding moral standpoint that is not already conditioned by a particular society, culture, or place in history, all moral and bioethical commitments are merely contingent, subject to particular human interests, aesthetic inclinations, personal intuitions, idiosyncratic choices, and political objectives. (shrink)

In his recent analysis of multiculturalism, Tom Beauchamp has argued that those who implement multicultural reasoning in their arguments against common morality theories, such as his own, have failed to understand that multiculturalism is neither a form of moral pluralism nor ethical relativism but is rather a universalistic moral theory in its own right. Beauchamp’s position is indeed on the right track in that multiculturalists do not consider themselves ethical relativists. Yet, Beauchamp tends to miss the mark when he argues (...) that multiculturalism is in effect a school of thought that endorses a form of moral universalism that is akin to his own vision of a common morality. As a supporter of multiculturalism, I would like to discuss some aspects of Beauchamp’s comments on multiculturalism and clarify what a multicultural account of public bioethics might look like. Ultimately, multiculturalism is purported as a means of managing diversity in the public arena and should not be thought of as endorsing either a version of moral relativism or a universal morality. By simultaneously refraining from the promotion of a comprehensive common moral system while it attempts to avoid a collapse into relativism, multiculturalism can serve as the ethico-political framework in which diverse moralities can be managed and in which opportunities for ethical dialogue, debate and deliberation on the prospects of common bioethical norms are made possible. (shrink)

Transhumanism is a “technoprogressive” socio-political and intellectual movement that advocates for the use of technology in order to transform the human organism radically, with the ultimate goal of becoming “posthuman.” To this end, transhumanists focus on and encourage the use of new and emerging technologies, such as genetic engineering and brain-machine interfaces. In support of their vision for humanity, and as a way of reassuring those “bioconservatives” who may balk at the radical nature of that vision, transhumanists claim common ground (...) with a number of esteemed thinkers and traditions, from the ancient philosophy of Plato and Aristotle to the postmodern philosophy of Nietzsche. It is crucially important to give proper scholarly attention to transhumanism now, not only because of its recent and ongoing rise as a cultural and political force, but because of the imminence of major breakthroughs in the kinds of technologies that transhumanism focuses on. Thus, the articles in this issue of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy are either explicitly about transhumanism or are on topics, such as the ethics of germline engineering and criteria for personhood, that are directly relevant to the debate between transhumanists and bioconservatives. (shrink)

An authentic Christian bioethical account of abortion must take into consideration the conflicting epistemologies that separate Christian moral theology from secular moral philosophy. Moral epistemologies directed to the issue of abortion that fail to appreciate the orientation of morality to God will also fail adequately to appreciate the moral issues at stake. Christian accounts of the bioethics of abortion that reduce moral-theological considerations to moral-philosophical considerations will not only fail to appreciate fully the offense of abortion, but morally mislead. This (...) article locates the bioethics of abortion within the theology of the Church of the first millennium, emphasizing that abortion was prohibited, whether or not one considered the embryo or fetus to be ensouled. (shrink)

Allyne L. Smith, Jr.; Personhood: Beginnings and Endings, Christian bioethics: Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical Morality, Volume 6, Issue 1, 1 January 2000, Pa.

Abortion was one of the issues around which modern bioethical reflection began. Not only were Roman Catholics and other Christians in the vanguard of those politically opposing the creation of perm...

The cardinal question in Christian moral theory and bioethics is whether the knowledge that Christians have (1) by grace and (2) by revelation (e.g., regarding the character of human and cosmic history as reaching from creation through the Incarnation and the Redemption to the Second Coming and the restoration of all things) makes a crucial contribution to understanding morality, as for example issues such as the good death and the morality of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. This article argues that such (...) a contribution is made by grace and revelation. The reduction of Roman Catholic moral theology and bioethics to secular bioethics is explored, as well as the necessity of the unique knowledge possessed by Christians for adequate end-of-life decision-making. (shrink)

H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.; Medicine, Philosophy, and Theology: Christian Bioethics Reconsidered, Christian bioethics: Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical Morali.

H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.; Bioethics after the Enlightenment, Christian bioethics: Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical Morality, Volume 8, Issue 3, 1 January 20.

H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.; Can Philosophy Save Christianity? Are the Roots of the Foundations of Christian Bioethics Ecumenical? Reflections on the Nature of.

H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.; Medicine and the Biomedical Sciences After God: Do Right-Worshipping Christians Know More Than Others About the Content of Morality.

The project of articulating a coherent, canonical, content-full, secular morality-cum-bioethics fails, because it does not acknowledge sin, which is to say, it does not acknowledge the centrality of holiness, which is essential to a non-distorted understanding of human existence and of morality. Secular morality cannot establish a particular moral content, the harmony of the good and the right, or the necessary precedence of morality over prudence, because such is possible only in terms of an ultimate point of reference: God. The (...) necessity of a rightly ordered appreciation of God places centrally the focus on holiness and the avoidance of sin. Because the cardinal relationship of creatures to their Creator is worship, and because the cardinal corporate act of human worship is the Liturgy, morality in general and bioethics in particular can be understood in terms of the conditions necessary, so as worthily to enter into Eucharistic liturgical participation. Morality can be summed up in terms of the requirements of ritual purity. A liturgical anthropology is foundational to an account of the content-full morality and bioethics that should bind humans, since humans are first and foremost creatures obliged to join in rightly ordered worship of their Creator. When humans worship correctly, when they avoid sin and pursue holiness, they participate in restoring created reality. (shrink)

The traditional roles of Christian chaplains in aiding patients, physicians, nurses, and hospital administrators in repentance, right belief, right worship, and right conduct are challenged by the contemporary professionalization of chaplaincy guided by post-Christian norms located in a public space structured by three defining postulates: the non-divinity of Christ, robust ecumenism, and the irrelevance of God’s existence. The norms of this emerging post-Christian profession of chaplaincy make interventions with patients, physicians, nurses, and hospital administrators in defense of specifically Christian bioethical (...) norms and goals unprofessional, because the chaplain is now directed as a professional to support health care services held to standards articulated within a secular morality. These changes are exemplar of the profound recasting of the dominant moral culture with wide-ranging implications for bioethics. (shrink)

David Denz; Bioethics and the Literature of Pluralism, Christian bioethics: Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical Morality, Volume 7, Issue 3, 1 January 2001, Pages.

The challenge in maintaining patient autonomy regarding medical decision-making and confidentiality lies not only in control over information transferred to and regarding patients, but in the ambiguity of autonomy itself. post-modernity is characterized by the recognition of not just numerous accounts of autonomy, but by the inability in a principled fashion to select one as canonical. Autonomy is understood as a good, a right-making condition, and an element of human flourishing. In each case, it can have a different content, depending (...) in part on whether it is given a nomological or a volitional construal. Different accounts of autonomy can lead to strikingly different understandings of appropriate behavior, including the argument that one ought on behalf of autonomy to liberate individuals from the sense of autonomy they themselves affirm. In the face of competing accounts of moral probity, autonomy in a secular morality and bioethics must by default be understood in terms of the permission of patients, which makes space for numerous moral accounts and different communal construals of free choice, which in turn will legitimate different practices of informing patients and maintaining confidentiality. (shrink)

According to G. E. Moore, moral expertise requires abilities of several kinds: the ability to factor judgments of right and wrong into (a) judgments of good and bad and (b) judgments of cause and effect, (2) the ability to use intuition to make the requisite judgments of good and bad, and (3) the ability to use empirical investigation to make the requisite judgments of cause and effect. Moore’s conception of moral expertise is thus extremely demanding, but he supplements it with (...) some very simple practical guidance. (shrink)

I examine the ways in which the theological and philosophical debate surrounding transhumanism might profit by a detailed engagement with contemporary biology, in particular with the mainline accounts of species and speciation. After a short introduction, I provide a very brief primer on species concepts and speciation in contemporary biological taxonomy. Then in a third section I draw out some implications for the prospects of our being able intentionally to intervene in human evolution for the production of new species out (...) of Homo sapiens. In a fourth section Account of Human Nature? And Where Does This Leave Transhumanism?”) I bring in the debate over the proper relationship between biological and theological conceptions of human nature, laying out the major options available and considering their possible implications for our understanding of transhumanism. In a fifth section several concrete examples are drawn out pertaining to particular subdisciplines within theology. I conclude by briefly laying out some suggestions for future work, focusing on tasks that theologians specifically ought to pursue. (shrink)