The Nature of Human Persons: Metaphysics and Bioethics by Jason T. Eberl (review)

Questions of bioethics concern human persons as animals, that is, as beings who are born and die, who become ill or injured and who recover or decline, who are not always strong and independent but who live and die in a web of interdependencies. At the same time, it concerns human beings as rational, relational, and cultural: as capable of making decisions (for themselves or for others, by themselves or with others) that can be judged as good or bad, as ethical or unethical.

How one does justice to the animal and rational aspects of human nature and understands them together as aspects of a unified being is far from straightforward. Unfortunately, much academic bioethical discussion launches straight into the ethical dilemmas of clinical medicine with little prior reflection on the fundamentals of moral philosophy and even less on the metaphysics of the human person as animal and rational. Jason Eberl is to be commended in seeking to address this lacuna and in bringing to it the resources of the Thomistic intellectual tradition. Eberl brings Thomas Aquinas into conversation with a number of contemporary English-speaking philosophers and seeks to show that Thomas provides a satisfying via media between substance dualism and reductive materialism.

The book has eight chapters, the first four of which concern the question "What am I?" framed as a question of human nature and of personal identity. Eberl lists nine desiderata (his term) that ought to be satisfied by any account of human nature. He then discusses hylomorphism (chap. 2), varieties of dualism (chap. 3), and varieties of materialism (chap. 4) before coming to the conclusion that Thomistic hylomorphism satisfies the desiderata more than do the other accounts he has surveyed.

Chapters 5 to 7 apply this account of the human person to the questions of when human beings begin to exist, when they die, and whether there could be hope for life for human persons beyond death. Chapters 5 and 6 do not address bioethical questions per se as "responses to the various bioethical issues at hand require combining metaphysical conclusions with a particular ethical theory and taking various values into account" (17). Nevertheless, where one's actions might end the life of some being, it is clearly ethically relevant to know whether that being is a human person. In contrast, it is much less obvious how chapter 7 relates to bioethics. This chapter does, however, provide important insight into Eberl's theological anthropology.

The final chapter, comprising a mere 10 pages (from a book of 260 pages), is the only chapter to discuss bioethical topics directly: abortion and care of people in a persistent vegetative state (PVS). Its brevity causes problems. The impression is given that cases of abortion are either unintended and proportionate or both "directly intended" and "disproportionate to the human person's death" (255). There is no discussion of abortion where the death of the unborn child is unintended but the good that is intended, while serious, is not a matter of life-or-death, no discussion of cases where the death of the child is intended but the good aimed for is a matter of life-and-death, and no discussion of cases such as craniotomy where death may be unintended but bodily harm is intended or at least, a bodily invasion that will in fact be lethally harmful. In relation to PVS there is no mention of the teaching of John Paul II (March 20, 2004) on the significance of providing nutrition and hydration or discussion of whether there are forms of care that are in principle obligatory. Eberl acknowledges that the chapter provides only "a brief treatment of these questions" but promises that "more in-depth treatments may be found in the works cited here" (250). Regrettably, the endnotes...