Often lurking below the surface of many clinical ethical issues are questions regarding background metaphysical, epistemological, meta-ethical, and political beliefs. In this issue, authors critically examine the effects of background beliefs on conscientious objection, explore ethical issues through the lenses of particular theoretical approaches like pragmatism and intersectional theory, rigorously explore the basic concepts at play within the patient safety movement, offer new theoretical approaches to old problems involving decision making for patients with dementia, explicate and explore the problems and (...) promises of machine learning in medicine, and offer us a non-rights-based argument for the just distribution of healthcare resources. (shrink)

Secular bioethics fails to grasp the central moral and spiritual realities of medicine. As the authors in this issue of Christian Bioethics argue, contemporary healthcare practice is often based on the false premise that medical science can secure the safety of human life. Yet, the standard “biopsychosocial model” of medicine fails to grasp the theological dimensions of healthcare often harming patients and their families in the process. Indeed, as the articles explore, all too often secular bioethics manipulates medicine to achieve (...) immoral purposes, such as active euthanasia of the sick or elderly. Such spiritual decay is acutely manifested in the pressure put on patients to accept an economically efficient and medically expedient assisted death as well as in how society often treats the human body as mere res—a thing unimportant in itself apart from animation as a living person. Together the articles illustrate that without careful religiously grounded advice modern medicine is often spiritually disorienting for both patients and practitioners. (shrink)