Last month, a fifty-eight-year old man developed bleeding into his cheek and oozing from sites where previously he had had blood samples drawn. This bleeding was caused by disseminated intravascular coagulation, a complication of colon cancer that had spread to his liver and lungs. This complication occurred even though he was on chemotherapy for the cancer. In the hospital, he received transfusions and was administered medicine to stop the bleeding. However, his condition did not improve. He developed more bruises. When (...) he tried to go to the bathroom without assistance, he fell, struck his head, requiring stitches, and developed a black, swollen eye. The patient, a successful businessman, had already overcome another type of cancer—lymphoma—through chemotherapy, twenty-five years ago. In a few days, this dynamic individual who expected to start experimental chemotherapy now saw his quality of life deteriorate steadily.We talked about more chemotherapy, about hospice, and about withholding attempts at resuscitation if his heart should stop. (shrink)

Physicians have long aided their patients in dying in an effort to ease human suffering. It is only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the prolongation of life has taken on new meaning due to the powers now available to physicians, through new drugs and high technology interventions. Whereas earlier physicians and patients could readily acknowledge that nothing further could be done, today that judgment is problematic.Most often, aiding the dying took the form of not doing anything further to (...) prolong life. Morally, this act of restraint was not difficult, because few options could have been considered. However, some physicians, rarely, would help patients die either by hastening death directly or by increasing pain control with the risk of hastening death, the so-called double effect. When directly hastening death, physicians either directly caused the death of the patient through euthansia, or supplied the means to the patient to bring about death with or without encouragement to use these means. The latter is physician-assisted suicide. (shrink)

This paper advances ways in which the understandings of “nature” and “creation” can be seen to overlap through specialized relations between humans and their environment. The hope of redemption of nature, united with evidences of grace in the advancements of science, can become helpful guides toward a theological interpretation of technology and the emerging character of human relations with nature.

Not that long ago, any thought of transferring body parts, or fluids like blood, among individuals was expressed in terms of a nightmare. Consider the problem of involuntary blood transfusions to Count Dracula! Or recall the infamous brain transplant to the brutish body under Dr. Frankenstein's ministrations. The very thought of bodily transference stimulated writers to create monsters. The stuff of evil seemed to surround any attempt. Hubris was considered the evil that exceeded the normal limits of scientific research and (...) development. Transplantation seemed to make humans into gods who defied death but who, like Icarus and his wax wings, flew too close to the sun. (shrink)

So much philosophical theory is irrelevant for the practice of ethics! How many wasted volumes of tortuous arguments and counterarguments have been written in search of an elusive theory of ethics that could be applied deductively, without modification, to produce “correct” answers under all circumstances to any ethical problem? The practice of ethics is much closer to the common sense casuistry approach outlined by Jonsen and Toulmin, in which we work from. intuitively grasped, paradigm, cases by way of analogy to (...) provide presumptive answers to more complex problems. Alasdair Maclntyre argued however that we cannot trust such individualistic intuitive judgements. Thus we should start by looking at his critique of modern ethics. (shrink)