Bioethics Quotes

“bioethics”

“The use of fetuses as organ and tissue donors is a ticking time bomb of bioethics.”

“Wikipedia: Bioethics”

“[Bioethics] is "a phony branch of elite philosophy whose principle purpose seems to be to justify allowing badly ill or disabled people to die."”

“In many ways it is anachronistic to use this term prior to the 1970s, for the phenomenon of bioethics was in many ways associated with the deprofessionalization of medical ethics and its reconceptualization as a secular, philosophically oriented discipline independent of the health care profession.”

“Christian bioethics is a puzzle. The very name suggests an ethics other than one for humans generally. Can there be an ethics just for certain humans? Has a special ethics been given to Christians as the Torah was given to Israel? Can there be an ethics for all people, but which only some people can know or know fully?”

“Orthodox bioethics is not natural-law oriented. Unlike Western Christianity, which came to look for traces of God in nature, Orthodox Christianity approaches nature as an icon, as a window through which to see God, with the result that Orthodox Christianity is innocent of the natural-law theory of the West (Foltz, 2001).”

“Secular bioethics emerged out of the Enlightenment hope to disclose a secular ethic that could transcend the multiplicity of Christianities and their moralities. This Enlightenment hope has persisted despite the bloodshed of the French and October Revolutions, leading among other things to the emergence of the medical humanities and the contemporary high expectations from a secular bioethics.”

“Because Orthodox morality is primarily therapeutic, it is not juridical. The goal is not to do justice but to bring God’s mercy to the repentant. Although any falling short of the mark of saintly perfection is sinful, the response to sin is not punitive (e.g., penance is not punishment but treatment). Bioethics should be healing, aimed at restoring through repentance and purification the individual’s focus on God.”

“A common sense of doing Christian medical ethics or bioethics was available for Roman Catholics until the mid-1960s. As John Berkman observes, “The conceptual continuity in moral theology is clearly visible from the manuals themselves, which in 1950 maintained the same basic structure and categories of the manuals which begin in 1605.” There was a confidence in the ability of moral theological reflection to answer the questions posed by new technological and scientific developments.”

“An exploration of Christian bioethics at the beginning of the 21st century might with relief be regarded as anachronistic, as a matter of the past. This side of the Renaissance and the French Revolution, the once-Christian West is increasingly post-Christian. Though in some countries a particular Christianity is still established – in Germany, two – their role and force for public policy are progressively marginalized in the framing of law and public policy. There is no society that is unabashedly Christian, as Spain under Franco or Portugal under Salazar had been Christian.”

“In approaching new technological developments, the present is set within the now of the past. In addressing issues such as cloning, the use of embryonic stem cells, and germ-line genetic engineering, Orthodox Christians will not seek new moral insights. There will not be a search for new medical-ethical or bio-ethical principles, but the recall of a permanent possibility for epistemic insight grounded in the consequences of the Incarnation. The goal will be to provide an expression of an abiding truth in part guided by the writings of the Fathers but always crucially sustained by the presence of the Holy Spirit, so as to express in a new context the enduring moral consciousness of the Church.”

“The aim of bioethics is to identify ethical problems raised by critical decision making in healthcare, and by genetic engineering and biotechnology research into microorganisms. Most of the key bioethical issues, especially the ones related to human life sprung from a debate between principles of morality, the development of science, and its potential contribution to ‘better living standards’, all framed within different cultural backgrounds. Bioethical research will thus take place interactively with other related disciplinary ethics. In the bioethical debate it is important not only to take on board the general perception of norms, but also to question until what extent bioethics will reshape those norm.”

“Orthodox Christians hold that Christian bioethics is non-developmental in the sense of affirming the same moral commitments and insights that directed the Church of the first thousand years: it understands that all that has been essential for the appropriate moral life has been available since the time of the Apostles. This difference from Western secular and religious moral philosophical understandings is in part grounded in the Orthodox Christian recognition that truth is not merely a what (i.e., a set of discursive propositions referring to an objective truth) but a radically transcendent Who (i.e., the Trinity), with Whom since Pentecost right-worshipping Christians have had the possibility of a full relationship.”

“There is an institutional explanation for the development of bioethics within Roman Catholic moral thought. Catholics, especially those in religious orders, have been institutionally involved in health care throughout its technological and institutional development. This is especially true of catholic involvement in hospitals over the last 150 years, the period in which health care developed into its present institutional form (Kaufmann, 1999). The moral questions raised in the institutional context of catholic health care, especially those involving difficult cases related to sexual morality, pregnancy, and end of life issues, provoked a pedagogical literature directed at nurses, physicians, and others. That literature is clearly continuous with, and an ancestor of, modern secular bioethics. Moreover, the institutional focus continues, for example, in the American bishops’ ‘’Ethical Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (National Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1994 and 2001)”

“As we have seen, Roman Catholic bioethics is a conceptually and institutionally mature set of inquiries. It has deep historical roots within catholic theology, doctrine, and canon law, and consequently a developed set of positions and methods of moral analysis. Although traditional authorities are accorded some respect by all engaged as Roman Catholics in bioethics, there are very significant disagreements among Catholic bioethicists. These disagreement reach so deeply into the fabric of moral life an thought that they suggest radical fissures within the Catholic community. These divisions of moral conviction would not be troubling if they were simply about new and difficult cases or about casuistical details; but, as the preceding summaries and citations indicate, they go to the heart of key norms themselves. The resolution of the most central of these disagreements is surely essential if the traditions of Catholic moralizing are to be effectively brought to bear on the bioethical perplexities facing the Roman Catholic community and others who may look to its riches for guidance.”

“There is a continuity between the discursive, rational commitments of the Scholasticism that emerged in the 13th century and the Enlightenment project of providing rational account of proper moral probity. Although the Enlightenment attempted to give an account of morality undirected by revelation and ecclesiastical authority, thus involving a substantive break with previous moral assumptions, the Enlightenment as well as Scholasticism share a substantive commitment to reason’s abilities to provide outside of right worship and right belief a universal account of morality. Bioethics as it took shape in the 1970s reflected a late-Enlightenment attempt to provide a secular surrogate for the religious moral authorities that had once guided the West (Engelhardt, 2002). Secular and Western Christian bioethics have drawn on philosophical assumptions regarding the capacities of discursive reflection. They both have a penchant for attempting to identify moral truths with the deliverances of systematic moral reflections. In contrast, Orthodox Christianity lives in an understanding of morality uncompromised by Scholasticism, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment.”

“The vocabulary and leading ideas of Catholic bioethics have developed out of the moral work of the great scholastic theologians, most notably from the moral analyses of St. Thomas Aquinas. This tradition of moral thought is often called “natural law theory” or the “natural law tradition” after a dominant component of Aquinas’s time, with notable highlights in the work of the 16th century Spanish scholastics, the 17th century causists, the 18th century synthesis of St. Alphonsus Ligouri, and the revival of Thomistic study in the ate 19th and 20th centuries. The working method throughout this period has been a form of casuistry: new and difficult cases were compared and contrasted with clearer, paradigm cases to illuminate their morally important properties so as to allow their correct moral classification is compatible with the absolutism that characterizes catholic moral analysis: the morally important properties of actions, once revealed by casuistry shows a certain form of intervention in pregnancy involves an intention to end or, more precisely, to shorten the life of the fetus, then the intervention is excluded by the exceptionless prohibition against intentionally killing the innocent.”

“The history of Roman Catholic bioethics is completely intermingled with that of Catholic morality more generally. Although that morality continues to be expounded and developed by moralists working in the Roman Catholic tradition, its overall history is largely unwritten. There is, of course, a large body of established scholarly work on the great figures of Roman Catholic moral theory, especially on St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine there are also studies on the history of Catholic moral teaching on particular moral issues, including abortion (Connery 1977), the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary treatments (Cronin, 1989), and contraception (Noonan, 1965). Finally, there are systematic treatments of Catholic bioethics (Ashley & O’Rourke, 19889). But there is no comprehensive study of the history of Catholic moral theology, much less the history of Catholic bioethics. In particular, little has been done to trace the development of Catholic moral thought in the period most essential for the development of distinctive Roman Catholic positions in bioethics – that is, the period from the sixteenth century Spanish scholastics to the dominance of the moral manuals in the half century before Vatican Council II.”

“The challenge of providing a secular foundation for bioethics can be seen as defined historically against three fundamental Western experiences of fracture and rupture: (1) the Reformation with its consequent fragmentation of Western Christendom into a plurality of Christianities and Christendoms, (2) the Enlightenment with its formation of a secular, intellectual culture, which aspired to transcend this diversity, and (3) post-modernity with its recognition that are returned to this diversity, given the Enlightenment's failure to justify a single, canonical, content-full morality by discursive reason alone. These experiences frame the moral geography for current debates regarding bioethics. They establish taken-for-granted expectations regarding moral diversity, the role of secular morality in spanning religious moral difference, and the contemporary experience of post-modernity. They account as well for a kind of nostalgia felt for the moral unity of the Western Middle Ages expressed in various hopes to see humans bound in a universal moral community governed by a global bioethics enforced legally across the world and in a persistent faith that discursive moral rationality can establish a universal ethic, despite its many failures.”