Bioethics and the Character of Human Life

Essays and Reflections

Gilbert Meilaender

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781725251281, 9781725251298
• eBook ISBN: 9781725251304
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In the essays collected here Gilbert Meilaender invites readers to reflect upon some of the bioethical issues that are important for all of us. The essays treat bioethics less as a discipline confined to a few experts than as a deeply humanistic set of concerns that inevitably draws us into religious and metaphysical issues. From reflections on his experience as a member of the President's Council on Bioethics to the way in which Christian trinitarian teaching has shaped what it means to be a person, from life's beginning to its ending, these essays offer readers a chance to think about matters of fundamental human significance.

I

Bioethics and Public Life

1

Bioethics and the Character of Human Life1

When the Hastings Center was founded in 1969 as the first bioethics “think tank” in the United States, it planned research in four areas of concern: death and dying (and efforts to overcome the limits of our finitude); behavior control (and the relation between human activities and the happiness attendant upon them); genetic screening, counseling, and engineering (including questions of kinship, procreation, and attitudes toward future generations); and population policy and family planning (which, at least implicitly, asked about the relation of our own time to future generations). If we add explicit attention to moral problems raised by human experimentation, the list could still today serve well as a brief itemization of the central concerns of bioethics. The reason these issues have been and continue to be central, and no doubt the reason bioethics has been an object of such lively public interest and concern, is obvious: These topics are not driven simply by concern for public policy regulations; rather, they involve some of the most important aspects of our humanity and raise some of the deepest questions about what it means to be human.

There is no neutral ground from which to discuss such questions. They are inevitably normative, value-laden, and metaphysical in character. Our starting point, therefore, should not deny this. Our approach should not be that taken by the Human Embryo Research Panel (established by NIH in the mid-1990s), which characterized its stance as follows:

Throughout its deliberations, the Panel considered the wide range of views held by American citizens on the moral status of preimplantation embryos. In recommending public policy, the Panel was not called upon to decide which of these views is correct. Rather, its task was to propose guidelines for preimplantation human embryo research that would be acceptable public policy based on reasoning that takes account of generally held public views regarding the beginning and development of human life. The Panel weighed arguments for and against Federal funding of this research in light of the best available information and scientific knowledge and conducted its deliberations in terms that were independent of a particular religious or philosophical perspective.

But, there are no such terms, and the public is not likely to believe such protestations of neutrality. We are not philosopher-kings who can adjudicate disputes between conflicting views without ourselves being parties to the argument. We are human beings, invited to reflect upon what that humanity means and requires in the field of bioethics.

In this essay I hope to invite such reflection and conversation. The essay explores, without attempting to resolve, some of the background issues that inevitably shape thought in bioethics. Acknowledging from the outset that much more might be said about any of them, I will unpack briefly four aspects of a truly human bioethics.

The Unity and Integrity of the Human Being

The beginning of wisdom in bioethics may lie in the effort to think about what human beings are and why it matters morally. From several different angles, medical advance has tempted us to lose sight of any sense in which the embodied human being is an integral, organic whole. We can illustrate this first by noting how advancing genetic knowledge encourages us to think of human beings as no more than collections of parts.

Consider the following sentences from Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea:

He looked down into the water and watched the lines that went straight down into the dark of the water. He kept them straighter than anyone did, so that at each level in the darkness of the stream there would be a bait waiting exactly where he wished it to be for any fish that swam there. . . . I have no understanding of it and I am not sure that I believe in it. Perhaps it was a sin to kill the fish. . . . He urinated outside the shack and then went up the road to wake the boy. He was shivering with the morning cold. . . . Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him. How many people will he feed, he thought. But are they worthy to eat him? . . . That was the saddest thing I ever saw with them, the old man thought. The boy was sad too and we begged her pardon and butchered her promptly. . . . The boy did not go down. He had been there before and one of the fishermen was looking after the skiff for him.

To read this passage as I have printed it here makes almost no sense; yet, each individual sentence is clear and is not hard to understand. The reason is a simple one. The sentences, though all from the same book, are drawn at random from pages 29, 104–5, 22, 74, 48, and 123—in that order.

This is not unlike the way we sometimes characterize our humanity in an age of rapid advances in genetic knowledge. Consider, for example, the following passage from biologist Thomas Eisner, cited by Mary Midgley:

As a consequence of recent advances in genetic engineering, [a biological species] must be viewed as . . . a depository of genes that are potentially transferable. A species is not merely a hard-bound volume of the library of nature. It is also a loose-leaf book, whose individual pages, the genes, might be available for selective transfer and modification of other species.

I have used The Old Man and the Sea to illustrate this, splicing together sentences from different parts of the book—and the result is something almost entirely unintelligible. And suppose I were also to splice in sentences from Pride and Prejudice and The Kid from Tompkinsville. We would then have an artifact we could not even name. As a book is not an artifact whose pages can simply be moved around willy-nilly, so also a human being is not what Eisner called “a depository of genes that are potentially transferable.” We might try to think of human beings (or the other animals) in that way, and, indeed, we are often invited to think of them as collections of genes (or as collections of organs possibly available for transplant), but we might also wonder whether in doing so we lose a sense of ourselves as integrated, organic wholes.

Even if we think of the human being as an integrated organism, the nature of its unity remains puzzling in a second way. The seeming duality of person and body has played a significant role in bioethics. As the language of “personhood” gradually came to prominence in bioethical reflection, attention has often been directed to circumstances in which the duality of body and person seems pronounced. Suppose a child is born who, throughout his life, will be profoundly retarded. Or suppose an elderly woman has now become severely demented. Suppose because of trauma a person lapses into a permanent vegetative state. How shall we describe such human beings? Is it best to say that they are no longer persons? Or is it more revealing to describe them as severely disabled persons? Similar questions arise with embryos and fetuses. Are they human organisms that have not yet attained personhood? Or are they the weakest and most vulnerable of human persons?

Related questions arise when we think of conditions often, but controversially, regarded as disabilities. Those who are deaf and have learned to sign perhaps create and constitute a culture of their own, a manualist as opposed to an oralist culture. If so, one might argue that they are disabled only in an oralist culture, even as those who hear but do not sign would be disabled if placed in the midst of a manualist culture. So long as the deaf are able to function at a high level within that manualist culture, does it matter in what way they function? Notice that the harder we press such views the less significant becomes any normative human form. A head, or a brain, might be sufficient, if it could find ways to carry out at a high level the functions important to our life.

Such puzzles are inherent in the human condition, and they are sufficiently puzzling that we may struggle to find the right language in which to discuss that aspect of the human being which cannot be reduced to body. Within the unity of the human being a duality remains, and I will here use the language of “spirit” to gesture toward it. As embodied spirits (or inspirited bodies) we stand at the juncture of nature and spirit, tempted by reductionisms of various sorts. We have no access to the spirit—the person—apart from the body, which is the place of personal presence; yet, we are deeply ill at ease in the presence of a living human body from which all that is personal seems absent. It is fair to say, I think, that, in reflecting upon the duality of our nature, we have traditionally given a kind of primacy to the living human body. Thus, uneasy as we might be with the living body from which the person seems absent, we would be very reluctant indeed to bury that body while its heart still beats.

In any case, the problems of bioethics force us to ask what a human being really is and, in doing so, to reflect upon the unity and integrity of the human person. We must think about the moral meaning of the living human body—whether it exists simply as an interchangeable collection of parts, whether it exists merely as a carrier for what really counts (the personal realm of mind or spirit), whether a living human being who lacks cognitive, personal qualities is no longer one of us or is simply the weakest and most needy one of us.

Finitude and Freedom

In one of his delightful essays, collected in The Medusa and the Snail, the late Lewis Thomas explores the deeply buried origins of our word hybrid. It comes from the Latin hybrida, the name for the offspring of a wild boar and a domestic sow. But in its more distant origins the word, as Thomas puts it, “carries its own disapproval inside.” Its more distant etymological ancestor is the Greek hubris, insolence against the gods. That is, buried somewhere in the development of our language is a connection between two beings unnaturally joined together and human usurping of the prerogatives of the gods. Thomas summarizes his excursion into etymology as follows: “This is what the word has grown into, a warning, a code word, a shorthand signal from the language itself: if man starts doing things reserved for the gods, deifying himself, the outcome will be something worse for him, symbolically, than the litters of wild boars and domestic sows were for the Romans.”

That is only one side of the matter, however. For Thomas can also write in a provocative paragraph,

Is there something fundamentally unnatural, or intrinsically wrong . . . in the ambition that drives us all to reach a comprehensive understanding of nature, including ourselves? I cannot believe it. It would seem to be a more unnatural thing . . . for us to come on the same scene endowed as we are with curiosity . . . and then for us to do nothing about it or, worse, to try to suppress the questions. This is the greater danger for our species, to try to pretend . . . that we do not need to satisfy our curiosity. . . .

Using some old religious language, we might say that Thomas sees how, given the duality of our nature, we may go wrong in either of two ways: pride or sloth. As prideful beings, we may strive to be all freedom—acknowledging no limits to our creativity, supposing that our wisdom is sufficient to master the world. As slothful beings, we may timidly fear freedom and ignore the lure of new possibilities. Either is a denial of something essential to being human, a reduction of the full meaning of our humanity. Clearly, Thomas is inclined to fear most the dangers of sloth, but that may be only the mark in him of a passing modernity.

In any case, the duality of body and person is clearly related to what we may call a duality of finitude and freedom. The human being is the place where freedom and finitude meet; hence, it will always contraven...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Bioethics and Public Life
• Thinking Theologically: Life’s Beginning
• Thinking Theologically: Life’s Ending
• Thinking Theologically: To Be a Person