Health and Human Flourishing: Religion, Medicine, and Moral Anthropology

Toward a Richer Bioethics: A Conclusion

Toward a Richer Bioethics: A Conclusion Edmund D. Pellegrino We have sought as best we can to clarify, promote and defend “being human.” Where might we seek help in thinking about “life lived humanly.” —President’s Council on Bioethics, Being Human In these words, President Bush’s council on bioethics expressed its need for a “richer bioethics” with which to confront the challenges to our humanity inherent in the human use of contemporary biotechnology.1 The council thus reminded itself, and all of us, of the pertinence for bioethics of what Ernst Cassirer rightly called “the Archimedean point, the fixed and immovable center of all thought.”2 By this he meant the question of man’s self-knowledge, the anthropological question “What is man?” This is the question set aside by previous committees, commissions, and reports. Yet it is the foundation stone on which the theory and content of any system of bioethics is ultimately set. It is the question that can no longer be taken for granted. In the end, the way we answer this question frames the wide range of different norms, principles, values, or intuitions that characterize today’s bioethical discourse. 248 edmund d. pellegrino If we do not know who and what it means to be human, how can we judge whether the prodigious powers of biomedical science threaten or enhance our humanity? Where else can we find the template with which to measure our attempts to benefit humankind? Since antiquity, the best minds of every era have addressed the question of man. Among modern philosophers, Max Scheler is perhaps the most acute in his interest and observation of our problem today. We have a plethora of theories of man; it is the reconciliation of the many sources of information that is so crucial today. “We have a scientific, philosophical and a theological anthropology which know nothing of each other. . . . The ever growing multiplicity of the sciences studying man has much more confused and obscured than elucidated our concept of man.”3 The president’s council clearly has many ways to which it may turn. The question is how to do justice to sources that are multiple, diverse, and often strongly in opposition to each other. Whether the president’s council, or any other body, can surmount these difficulties is problematic. What is clear is that overtly, or covertly, there is an idea or image of man at the heart of most tendentious bioethical issues of the day—abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, end-of-life decisions, stem cell research, cloning, genomic engineering, human enhancements, and so on. The list assuredly will grow, and with it the necessity for more direct confrontation with what we mean about being human. Today we must confront these complex issues without the traditional reliance on religion and metaphysics. The Enlightenment stripped these away and left us with autonomous reason; the idealist philosophers then turned away from external reality to mental constructs and consciousness. Under the influence of psychology and psychoanalysis, postmodernists completed the demolition by undermining the claims of reason to know external reality or moral truth. Man now face the most complex challenges in history to their humanity equipped only with their autonomous selfdefined subjective humanity.4 These difficulties do not absolve bioethics of its neglect of the anthropological question. At the minimum, there is an obligation to try to bring the sciences dealing with man together with philosophy and theology, in an effort to find some agreed-upon set of norms to guide our private and public decision making. In bioethics, an initial attempt is being made by UNESCO’s International Bioethics Committee (2005). This effort underscores the difficulties as well as the opportunities of a global effort to confront man’s tenuous future in the new world of biotechnology. Toward a Richer Bioethics: A Conclusion 249 Other chapters in this book confront the anthropological question tangentially , with reflections on the human phenomena of vulnerability, suffering , disease, finitude, and existential anguish. As one might expect, different images and ideas of man emerge. They reinforce the need for serious dialogue between, and among, these differing ideas when moral decisions must be made personally or politically. Dell’Oro does confront the barriers and opportunities of dialogue between bioethics and one clearly stated idea and image of man—that of Roman Catholic moral theology.5 He offers a framework for opening a dialogue that will be mutually beneficial. In this...