In Neither Beast Nor God, Gilbert Meilaender elaborates the philosophical, social, theological, and political implications of the question of dignity, and ...

In this book noted theologian and ethicist Gilbert C. Meilaender examines how the field of bioethics has developed over the last quarter century and reconsiders some of its central concepts and arguments. Because the literature of bioethics has become increasingly less influenced by religious and theological concerns over the past three decades, it is Meilaender's specific aim to uncover and recapture the importance of theological reflection for current debates in bioethics. Meilaender suggests that the development of bioethics as a discipline (...) in its own right has not been entirely benign. He argues that an increasing focus on public policy has obscured the importance of background beliefs about human nature and destiny, and that without drawing attention to those beliefs one cannot fully see what is at stake in many bioethical debates. Rather than seeking a minimalist consensus, Meilaender explores ethical problems surrounding the end and beginning of life in order to uncover the "soul"-that is, some of the deeper issues within bioethics that need our attention. Abortion, the issue that so often lurks just beneath the surface of bioethical argument, is discussed in the final chapter. Throughout the book Meilaender emphasizes the "soul" of all these issues -questions about who we are and what we may become, and suggests that recapturing that soul will lead us to a new appreciation of the living body as the locus of personal presence. Ethicists, theologians, and bioethicists will appreciate Body, Soul, and Bioethics for redirecting bioethical discussion away from its current focus on public policy back toward questions of metaphysical and religious significance. (shrink)

This essay considers whether palliative sedation is or is not appropriate medical care. This requires one to consider whether, in addition to the good of health, relief of suffering is also a proper end of medicine; whether unconsciousness can ever be a good for a human being; and how double-effect reasoning can help us think about difficult cases. The author concludes that palliative sedation may be proper medical care, but only in a limited range of cases.

This new edition of his "Bioethics features updated information throughout, a fuller discussion of human embryos -- including stem cell research -- and a ...

To live the risen life with God is, presumably, to be what we are meant to be. What can we conclude about our duties to the dying from the medieval belief that we join the hosts of heaven as “animated earth”?

Central to Augustine's understanding of rightly ordered sexuality is his belief that the pleasure of the act should not be separated from its good (procreation). It is useful to observe that he reasons in a similar way about eating: that the pleasure of eating should not be separated from its good (nourishment). Inadequacies in his understanding of the purpose of food and eating may be instructive when we think about inadequacies in his understanding of sex. If there is more to (...) food than he imagines, the same may be true of sex. Correcting for such inadequacies may also help correct for the (inadvertent) way in which his understanding of the purpose of sex may seem to legitimize technologies of assisted reproduction. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: No Longer Patient: Feminist Ethics & Health Care. By Susan Sherwin Feminist Perspectives in Medical Ethics. Edited by Helen Bequaert Holmes and Laura M. Purdy.

Seeking useful ways to respond to the Covid‐19 pandemic, bioethicists have been tempted to claim for themselves what Alasdair MacIntyre characterized in After Virtue as the moral fiction of managerial expertise. They have been eager to offer a wide range of policy prescriptions, presenting themselves as bureaucratic managers and suggesting an expertise that bioethics may not in fact be able to offer. This was evident, for example, in the petition published by The Hastings Center in March 2020. The pandemic could (...) foster a more hopeful future for bioethics if it were to focus attention less on policy decisions that belong to all citizens and more on some of the most basic moral questions that life presents and with which bioethics has always dealt—including, surely, the virtues needed in order to live well in a time of pandemic. (shrink)

In a widely noted book, Henry Greely has suggested that “the end of sex” is on the horizon. By this he means that sexual activity for pleasure will be increasingly disconnected from the process by which children are conceived—a result of the growing availability of what he terms Easy PGD. This essay explores the possibility that this sense of an “end” of sex fails to attend adequately to another sense of “end”—namely, the telos that connects human sexual activity to the (...) birth of children. Articulating a Christian understanding of procreation, the essay notes that Easy PGD may invite us to miss the human significance of the connection between the love-giving and life-giving aspects of sexual activity. (shrink)

Reflecting upon some problems of the moral life, Gilbert Meilaender considers their difficulties within a vision that accentuates not only the limits, but also the promise, of the Christian story. Created by God as finite beings, we make particular attachments. Redeemed by God for a community transcending nature and history, our love always carries us beyond the special bonds of time and place. We live, therefore, with a sense of permanent tension. If this tension heightens our sense of the perplexities (...) of life, it should not free us from the obligation to probe, clarify, and resolve some of those difficulties. The author holds that theological ethics must clarify the direction for growth and development within the Christian life. He undertakes such analysis, emphasizing throughout the limits of the human condition, the importance of our nature as embodied persons, and the danger and pretension in some of our attempts to take control of and master human life. This Christian vision is developed in chapters that explore a range of moral problems, such as abortion, artificial reproduction, euthanasia, care for defective infants, provision of artificial nutrition and hydration, and marital and political community. These are throughout, however, _theological_ explorations. Taken together they illumine not only particular problems of the moral life but a vision of life—classically Christian in its conception, humane in its care for particular bonds of attachment, and modest in its recognition of moral limits on our ability to seek the good. Meilaender has developed a broad recognition both among scholars and students of ethics and among interested general readers. He has the capacity to throw fresh angles of vision on complex problems so as to help both the sophisticated and the uninitiated reader to think more penetratingly about moral questions. (shrink)

Gilbert Meilaender here offers reflections on the moral life from within the life of faith. Drawing on such diverse sources as E.B. White, Alasdair MacIntyre, Augustine and Felix Salten, the author of Bambi, Meilaender focuses on the particular shape of the Christian life as it pertains to the commitments of believers and to the way in which those commitments form moral vision.

The author suggests that Christian participation in public policy deliberations about bioethical issues may be helped by structures which do not require the search for consensus (or, in particular, the kind of ‘overlapping consensus’ favoured by Rawlsians) on policy. This argument is made, first, by a general discussion of the place of religious visions within public discourse and, second, by an examination of the structure and some of the reports of the President’s Council on Bioethics (USA).

In essays written throughout his career, Stanley Hauerwas has unfolded a Christian vision of the marriage bond and the presence of children that seeks insistently to place these seemingly natural bonds within the new family of God that is the church. I examine his understanding, aiming to appreciate the Christian vision displayed while also suggesting that his emphasis on the new thing God does in the church is sometimes allowed to absorb and thereby lose the distinctive significance of the created (...) bonds of marriage and family. (shrink)

Flesh of My Flesh is a collection of articles by today's most respected scientists, philosophers, bioethicists, theologians, and law professors about whether we should allow human cloning. It includes historical pieces to provide background for the current debate. Religious, philosophical, and legal points of view are all represented.

This essay considers what it means to work within and attempt to retrieve aspects of a tradition of thought, in particular, the Christian tradition. Doing so places us in close proximity to certain conversation partners, but it does so without closing off possible enrichment from those who do not share our tradition. Perhaps the most critical issue involves freedom—that is, whether retrieving one's tradition undermines our own freedom or our recognition of God's. As an illustration of thinking within the Christian (...) tradition, the essay then considers the concept of a person, attempting to distinguish it from the more recent language of personhood. (shrink)

Our moral puzzles about abortion will not be resolved by resort to compromise positions and adoption of middle ground, for abortion concerns how we understand ourselves as a people and how we define membership in this community.

In this article Gilbert Meilaender responds to nine scholars whose papers analyze and interact with a variety of theological and ethical themes that emerge in his writing. Among those themes are the moral limits grounded in our embodied nature, the freedom to transcend those limits, the perfection of that nature by divine grace, the relation between political progress toward a common good and the kingdom of God, the place of religious beliefs in public discourse within a liberal democratic society, the (...) meaning and scope of our responsibility to care for human persons at the beginning and end of life, and the meaning of our creaturely longing to rest in God. (shrink)

It is almost commonplace to suggest that what is morally right for one person to do must also be right for anyone else similarly situated. The author suggests that this "universalization requirement" applies to only a limited sphere of the moral life, chiefly to duties of perfect obligation. Extending the requirement beyond this sphere fails to leave room for human freedom in vocation or for a clear recognition of human finitude.

In a time of intensified interest in an "ethic of virtue," Josef Pieper stands out as one who has pondered and written about the virtues for many years. This paper explores some aspects of Pieper's thought about the virtues and focuses especially on four problems: (1) the question of the unity of the virtues; (2) the relation between natural and theological virtues; (3) the dangers for Christian ethics of picturing virtue as habitual; and (4) the question whether virtue needs any (...) reward beyond virtue itself. (shrink)

This paper explores Paul Ramsey's thought on the question of how properly to care for the sick and dying. Ramsey's views were carefully articulated in "The Patient as Person" and, eight years later, "Ethics at the Edges of Life". Those two treatments are the centerpiece of analysis here, an analysis that argues for essential continuity in Ramsey's view, even though issues are sharpened and explored in new ways in the later work. The theological vision underlying Ramsey's thought on this topic (...) is also examined and explored. (shrink)

The text in which the original JRE editors announced the mission of their newly launched scholarly journal is susceptible to different readings. While Ronald Green has interpreted it as an intention to "effect" a "movement from Christian ethics to religious ethics," the author expresses doubt that any such general framework of "religious ethics" can be discerned in or imposed on distinctive religious traditions. He suggests that the problem of "parochialism and Western bias" is best addressed not through the imperialism of (...) the generic but through sustained attention to the distinctive and particular in all its variations. (shrink)