Christian bioethics, secular bioethics, and the claim to cultural authority.

Though the papers in this volume for the most part address the question, "What is Christian about Christian Bioethics", this paper addresses instead a closely related question, "How would a Christian approach to bioethics differ from the kind of secular academic bioethics that has emerged as such an important field in the contemporary university?" While it is generally assumed that a secular bioethics rooted in moral philosophy will be more culturally authoritative than an approach to bioethics grounded in the contingent particularities of a religious tradition, I will give reasons for rejecting this assumption. By examining the history of the recent revival of academic bioethics as well as the state of the contemporary moral philosophy on which it is based I will suggest that secular bioethics suffers from many of the same liabilities as a carefully articulated Christian bioethics. At the end of the paper I will turn briefly to examine the question of how, in light of this discussion, a Christian bioethics might best be pursued.     

The value of dignity in and for bioethics: rethinking the terms of the debate

The discussion of the nature and value of dignity in and for bioethics concerns not only the importance of the concept but also the aims of bioethics itself. Here, I challenge the claim that the concept of dignity is useless by challenging the implicit conception of usefulness involved. I argue that the conception of usefulness that both opponents and proponents of dignity in bioethics adopt is rooted in a narrow understanding of the role of normative theory in practical ethical thinking. I then offer an alternate understanding of the nature and value of dignity. I begin by recognizing that claims that one’s dignity has been violated point to an important difference between “respect for autonomy” and “respect for persons.” I then suggest three different conceptions of how dignity can be normatively guiding for bioethics, and conclude that, ultimately, understanding dignity as the cornerstone of a reflective perspective that frames moral reflection and deliberation is valuable for doing bioethics well.     

Character-Principlism and the Particularity Objection

This paper is a response to particularist critics of the normative force of moral principles. The particularist critique, as I understand it, is a rejection not only of principle-based accounts of moral deliberation and justification, but also of accounts of character in which principles play a central role. I focus on the latter challenge and counter it with a view I call character-principlism .
I begin by discussing in a general way what motivates the particularity objection to principles and then contrast two views – both of which insist on the importance of attentiveness to particularity – about the relative normative status of principles and particular cases. I present some reasons for believing that we need a more normatively robust conception of the role of moral principles than the particularists provide. In the main portion of the paper, I discuss how character-principlism sees principles functioning in our lives and the lives we lead with others. I contrast this with some other accounts of desirable character that particularists can embrace, and argue that these are seriously flawed because, unlike character-principlism, they cannot satisfactorily explain how a person could possess the constancy of character that moral integrity requires.     

Whose tradition? Which Enlightenment? What content? Engelhardt, Hauerwas, Capaldo, and the future of Christian bioethics.

The development of a content-full Christian bioethics requires an analysis of the particular contents and traditions which different Christians bring to morality. For Hauerwas, the content of Christian ethics is the speech and practices of the community. For Engelhardt, only a content-full tradition, such as the Orthodox tradition, will be able to arrive at closure on the moral issues presented by the contemporary practice of medicine. Capaldi calls, in contrast, for a Kantian society of autonomous self-legislators whose responsible freedom is grounded in a cosmic order that must be explicated and retrieved in particular practices. The manner in which we view our own traditions and the shortcomings of modernity determine the content that Christianity brings to bioethics.     

The ecumenical and non-ecumenical dialectic of Christian bioethics.

Non-ecumenical Christian bioethics will seem a strange category for many. The category relies on the recognition that bioethics mediates morality and ethics in healthcare. As such bioethics will have particular content. It is the content of a moral vision that both divides and unites. The enterprise of non-ecumenical Christian bioethics explores how Christians are both divided and united on the issue of bioethics. Non-ecumenical Christian bioethics is opposed to a facile ecumenism that reduces the content of Christian morality to the lowest common denominator.     

Christian bioethics as non-ecumenical.

A community's morality depends on the moral premises, rules of evidence, and rules of inference it acknowledges, as well as on the social structure of those in authority to rule knowledge claims in or out of a community's set of commitments. For Christians, who is an authority and who is in authority are determined by Holy Tradition, through which in the Mysteries one experiences the Holy Spirit. Because of the requirement of repentance and conversion to the message of Christ preserved in the Tradition, the authority of the community must not only exclude heretical teaching but heretical communities from communion. Understanding Christian bioethics requires a focus on the content of that bioethics in terms of its social context within a right-believing, right-worshipping community. Christian bioethics should be non-ecumenical by recognizing that true moral knowledge has particular moral content, is communal, and is not fully available outside of the community of right worship. The difficulty with Roman Catholicism's understandings of bioethics lies not just in its continued inordinate accent on the role of reason apart from repentance (as well as in its defining novel doctrines), but in Roman Catholicism's not recognizing that the contemporary, post-Christian age is in good measure the consequence of its post-Vatican II failure to call for a return to the traditional pieties and asceticisms of the Fathers so that all might know rightly concerning the requirements of Christian bioethics.     

Dignity and Animals. Does it Make Sense to Apply the Concept of Dignity to all Sentient Beings?

Although the idea of dignity has always been applied to human beings and although its role is far from being uncontroversial, some recent works in animal ethics have tried to apply the idea of dignity to animals. The aim of this paper is to discuss critically whether these attempts are convincing and sensible. In order to assess these proposals, I put forward two formal conditions that any conception of dignity must meet (non-redundancy and normative determinacy) and outline three main approaches which might justify the application of dignity to animals: the species-based approach, moral individualism and the relational approach. Discussing in particular works by Martha Nussbaum and Michael Meyer I argue that no approach can convincingly justify the extension of dignity to animals because all fail to meet the formal conditions and do not provide an appropriate basis for animal dignity. I conclude by arguing that the recognition of the moral importance of animals and their defense should appeal to other normative concepts which are more appropriate than dignity.     

What is Christian about Christian bioethics?

What is Christian about Christian bioethics? The short answer to this question is that the Incarnation should shape the form and content of Christian bioethics. In explicating this answer it is argued that contemporary medicine is unwittingly embracing and implementing the transhumanist dream of transforming humans into posthumans. Contemporary medicine does not admit that there are any limits in principle to the extent to which it should intervene to improve the quality of human life. This largely inarticulate, yet ambitious, agenda is derived first in late modernity's failed, but nonetheless ongoing, attempt to transform necessity into goodness, and second the loss of any viable concept of eternity, thereby stripping temporal existence of any normative significance. In short, medicine has become the vanguard of a profane attempt to save humankind by extracting data from flesh. In response, it is contended that an alternative Christian bioethics must be shaped by the Incarnation, the Word made flesh. This assertion does not entitle Christians to oppose the posthuman trajectory of contemporary medicine on the basis of any natural or biological essentialism. Rather, it is an evangelical witness to the grace of Christ's redemption instead of the work of self-transformation. It is Christ alone who thereby makes the vulnerability and mortality of finitude a gift and blessing. Specifically, it is maintained that the chasm separating necessity and goodness cannot be filled but only bridged through the suffering entailed in Christ's cross, and through Christ's resurrection eternity becomes the standard against which the temporal lives of human creatures are properly formed and measured. Consequently, Christian bioethics should help us become conformed to Christ rather than enabling self-transformation.     

Rehabilitating Warranted Assertibility: Moral Inquiry and the Pragmatic Basis of Objectivity

This article defends a pragmatic conception of objectivity for the moral domain. I begin by contextualizing pragmatic approaches to objectivity and discuss at some length one of the most interesting proposals in this area, Cheryl Misak's conception of pragmatic objectivity. My general argument is that in order to defend a pragmatic approach to objectivity, the pragmatic stance should be interpreted in more radical terms than most contemporary proposals do. I suggest in particular that we should disentangle objectivity from truth, and I claim that moral inquiry is in most cases responsive to a normative standard that is closer to warranted assertibility than to truth. Using an argument that relies partly on Huw Price's account of forms of normative assertion, I will show that a practice‐based account of warranted assertibility does the epistemic work required to defend objectivity while avoiding exposure to the criticisms that are usually addressed against this notion.     

理论和处境:汉语基督教伦理研究的基本思路探究

本文探究汉语基督教伦理研究的基本思路问题,特别关注具体处境中基督教价值的公共意义问题,论文包括:第一部分,考察1980年以来汉语基督教伦理研究的主要内容,总体上看,其中包括两大方面:一是对基本伦理概念(比如人性、爱的观念)及其与中国传统思想相关观念进行比照的研究,二是实践和具体社会处境的角度,包括从基督教角度对于中国基督徒的道德生活以及全球和本土范围的社会公共问题的研究;第二部分依据相关的基督教伦理研究成果,参照中国思想资源和当代社会的道德议题,反思汉语基督教研究的处境性问题并寻求重新阐释某些基督教教义的可能性.研究采用基督教伦理研究中的实在的和处境化的进路,将之放在一个特定的文化和社会背景下并考虑到其具体和当下的条件来展开对基督教伦理思想的论述.     

Between morality and repentance: recapturing "sin" for bioethics.

Distinguishing within "sin" the dimensions of anomia, hamartia, and asthenia makes it possible to analyze in greater detail the contrary manners in which traditional and post-traditional Christianities in this issue of Christian Bioethics endeavor to recapture what was lost when secular bioethics reconstructed the specifically spiritual-context-oriented normative commitments of Christianity in one-dimensionally moral terms. Various post-traditional attempts at securing moral orientation and resources for forgiveness, both of which secular bioethics finds increasingly difficult to provide, are critically reviewed. Their engagement of secular moral concepts and concerns, and even their adoption of an academically philosophical posture and language, is presented as responsible for their failure to adequately preserve what in traditional Christianity would count as prohibited vs. permitted, and advisable vs. non-advisable, or what would allow to resolve "tragic conflicts." The deeper reason for this failure lies in post-traditional Christianity's restricting the Christian life (with its central tension between love and the law) to what can be captured by cognitive categories. As the survey of several traditionally Christian accounts of sin in bioethics makes clear, both moral orientation (along with the resolution of "tragic" conflicts) and the sources of forgiveness are available, once that Christian life is framed in terms of persons' spirit-supported practical involvement in ascesis and liturgy, and once bioethical reflections are situated in the experiential context of such involvement.     

Bioethics critically reconsidered: Living after foundations

Given intractable moral pluralism, what ought one to make of the bioethics that arose in the early 1970s, grounded as it was in the false assumption that there is a common secular morality that secular bioethics ought to apply? It is as if bioethics developed without recognition of the crisis at the heart of secular morality itself. Secular moral rationality cannot of itself provide the foundations to identify a particular morality and its bioethics as canonical. One is not just confronted with intractable moral and bioethical pluralism, but with the absence of a secular ground that can show why one should act morally rather than self-interestedly. The result is not merely the deflation of much of traditional Western morality to life-style and death-style choices, but the threat of deflating to political slogans the now-dominant secular morality, including its affirmation of human autonomy, equality, social justice, and human dignity. All of this invites one critically to reconsider the meaning and force of secular bioethics.     

How philosophy and theology have undermined bioethics.

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.     

Bioethics and sin.

On the basis of a historical reconstruction of the stages through which the Christian notion of sin took shape in Protestantism, the significance of this term for modern bioethics is derived from its opposition to a holiness of God and his creatures, which in turn translates into the secular moral concept of dignity. This dignity imposes obligations to respect and to relationships that are sustained by faithfulness and trust. In being based on the gratuitousness of God's grace, such relationships preclude attempts at instrumentalization, denial of singularity, and subjection to market forces. Accordingly, reproductive cloning as well as exposing medicine to economical considerations can be classified as sinful. The difference between sinful acts and humans' sinful state furthermore permits to address the problems of evil and misfortune in the world, and to acknowledge humans' responsibility for the threats to humanity entailed by those ills. While the Christian faith relies on God's mercy, it also imposes the task of following Christ by fighting against evil and misfortune.     

How Christian Norms Can Have an Impact on Bioethics in a Pluralist and Democratic Europe: A Scandinavian Perspective

This article assesses the similarity and difference betweenthe Western European style of doing bioethics and the Scandinavianone. First, it reviews the introductory article by the editor,C. Delkeskamp-Hayes in the first issue of Christian Bioethics(2008), devoted to the possibility of a specifically Christianbioethics in Europe. Second, it analyses bioethics debates inScandinavian today. In light of Delkeskamp-Hayes' article, themain similarity is that both regions are facing secularizationas a threat to basic Christian values, for example, to the Christianview of the sanctity and dignity of the human life. But theScandinavian tends to reduce Christian bioethics to Luther'sconcept of the worldly kingdom, supposed to foster a dialoguebetween Christians and non-Christians on controversial ethicalissues. Despite the positive value of the dialogue, this strategyrenders Christian ethics powerless. Third, from an evangelicaltheological standpoint, it proposes some strategies for enhancingthe influence of Christian commitments on bioethical laws andpolicies.     

Autonomous Self-Expression and Meritocratic Dignity

While “dignity” plays an increasingly important role in contemporary moral and political debates, there is profound dispute over its definition, meaning, and normative function. Instead of concluding that dignity’s elusiveness renders it useless, or that it signals its fundamental character, this paper focuses on illuminating one particular strand of meritocratic dignity. It introduces a number of examples and conceptual distinctions and argues that there is a specific strand of “expressive” meritocratic dignity that is not connected to holding a special office or rank, but that is ascribed to individuals who are able to engage in autonomous self-expression.     

作为一项权利的人的尊严

The concept of human dignity and the relationship between dignity and human rights have been important subjects in contemporary international academia. This article first analyzes the different understandings of the concept of dignity, which has left great influences in history (including the “theory of attribution-dignity”, the “theory of autonomy-dignity” or the “theory of moral completeness/achievement-dignity”, and the “theory of end-in-itself-dignity”); it then exposes the obvious defects of these modes of understanding; finally, it tries to define dignity as a moral right to be free from insult. Meanwhile, the relationship between human dignity and human rights is clarified as a result of this research: Rather than being the foundation of human rights, human dignity is one of human rights. The idea of dignity nevertheless has a particular status in ethics in that it embodies a kind of core moral concern, representing a basic demand rooted in the human self or individuality, and hence representing an important aspect of human rights. We may anticipate that sooner or later, the idea of human dignity will become, together with other human rights, the only intangible cultural heritage of human society. __________ Translated by Zhang Lin from Zhexue yanjiu 哲学研究 (Philosophical Researches), 2008, (6): 85–92