Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the basis of all other rights, given that Christians repudiate the view that
the body is simply a prison for the immortal soul. Harming the body
harms the self at its depth. “Bodilyness and human life belong insepa-
rably together,” in Bonhoeffer's words. Our bodies are ends in them-
selves. This has “very far-reaching consequences for the Christian
appraisal of all the problems that have to do with the life of the body,
housing, food, clothing, recreation, play and sex.” We can use our bodies
and the bodies of others well or ill.
The most striking and radical excision of the integrity and right of
natural life is “arbitrary killing,” the deliberate destruction of “innocent
life.” Here, Bonhoeffer mentions examples such as abortion, killing
defenseless prisoners or wounded soldiers, and destroying lives we do
not find worth living—a clear reference to Nazi euthanasia and genoci-
dal policies toward the ill, the infirm, and all persons with handicaps.
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As Bonhoeffer puts it, “The right to live is a matter of the essence” and
not of any socially imposed or constructed values. Even “the most
wretched life” is “worth living before God.” Other violations of the
liberty of the body include physical torture, arbitrary seizure, enslave-
ment (American slavery is here referenced), deportations, separation of
persons from home and family—the full panoply of horrors that the
twentieth century, in particular, has dished up in superabundance. The
fragment by Bonhoeffer on the natural is powerfully suggestive and
worth pondering as an alternative to those cultural dictates that declare
any appeal to nature or the natural as a standard illegitimate. It goes
without saying that much more work would need to be done in order to
redeem the categories of nature and the natural, but I here simply want
to note that our present circumstances resist this conceptual and ethical
possibility even as the need for some such standard becomes ever-more
exigent. We need powerful and coherent categories and analyses that
challenge cultural projects that deny finitude, promise a technocratic
agenda that ushers in almost total human control over all of the natural
world including those natures we call human, push toward an ideal of
sameness through genetic manipulation and self-replication via cloning,
and continue with the process of excision of bodies deemed unworthy
to appear among us and share our world.
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Perfection requires manipu-
lation and elimination: there is a kind of purificationist imperative at
work here as we aim to weed out the flawed, and recognize only the
