The gulf between Christian and secular bioethics has far-reaching implications for public policy, healthcare organizations, clinicians, and patients and their families. There also are significant differences among various Christian approaches to bioethics. Differences and similarities between Christian and secular bioethics as well as among Christian approaches to bioethics are evident across three domains explored in this issue of Christian Bioethics. The first concerns different approaches to or methods for resolving ethical questions. The second concerns the ways in which understandings of (...) health and disease and human anthropology shape our judgments about what we may do in the pursuit of health or in response to disease. The third concerns how our perceptions of and regard for others affect judgments of moral worth and can influence healthcare decision-making. (shrink)

A complex interaction of ideological, financial, social, and moral factors makes the financial sustainability of health care systems a challenge across the world. One difficulty is that some of the moral commitments of some health care systems collide with reality. In particular, commitments to equality in access to health care and to fair equality of opportunity undergird an unachievable promise, namely, to provide all with the best of basic health care. In addition, commitments to fair equality of opportunity are in (...) tension with the existence of families, because families are aimed at advantaging their own members in preference to others. Because the social-democratic state is committed to fair equality of opportunity, it offers a web of publicly funded entitlements that make it easier for persons to exit the family and to have children outside of marriage. In the United States, in 2008, 41% of children were born outside of wedlock, whereas, in 1940, the percentage was only 3.8%, and in 1960, 5%, with the further consequence that the social and financial capital generated through families, which aids in supporting health care in families, is diminished. In order to explore the challenge of creating a sustainable health care system that also supports the traditional family, the claims made for fair equality of opportunity in health care are critically reconsidered. This is done by engaging the expository device of John Rawls’s original position, but with a thin theory of the good that is substantively different from that of Rawls, one that supports a health care system built around significant copayments, financial counseling, and compulsory savings, with a special focus on enhancing the financial and social capital of the family. This radical recasting of Rawls, which draws inspiration from Singapore, is undertaken as a heuristic to aid in articulating an approach to health care allocation that can lead past the difficulties of social-democratic policy. (shrink)

The contemporary societies of the West are characterized by a collision of radically incommensurable cultures, that of traditional Christianity and that of the robustly laicist cultures that took shape in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, drawing not only on the French Revolution and the Western European Enlightenment but also on deep roots in the synthesis of faith and reason that framed the thirteenth-century Western Christian Middle ages. This article explores the foundational contrast and conflict between traditional Christian bioethics and the (...) now-dominant secular culture through a portrayal of the historical and conceptual geography of the collapse of the Christendom established by St. Constantine the Great, Equal-to-the-Apostles, and on account of the emergence of secular fundamentalist states. The question is addressed anew as to what Athens can have to do with Jerusalem, as well as to what the Academy can have to do with the Church. The differences between a traditional Christian bioethics and a secular bioethics are illustrated in terms of questions bearing on the use of life-prolonging and death-postponing treatment. (shrink)

The role of nursing faculty members in charge of ethics education is important. Although all nursing students receive the same bioethics education, their experiences differ, related to ethical qualification, which depends on the personal socialization process. This Korean study aimed to provide nursing faculty members with the basic data to help them develop as bioethics experts and provide nursing students with knowledge to improve their ethical decision-making abilities. We used a survey design to assess recognition of bioethical issues and ethical (...) qualification in nursing students and faculty members. A total of 1225 undergraduate students and 140 faculty members participated in this study. The results revealed that nursing students and nursing faculty members generally understood the seriousness of various bioethical issues and both considered the most serious issue to concern abortion. Ethical behavior can be improved by education, and accordingly, nursing ethics should be a mandatory subject, rather than an elective one. (shrink)