Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
perfect and the fit. Wrapped up in a quest for control, immersed in the
images and rhetoric of choice and self-possession, we will find it more
and more difficult to ask the right sorts of questions as we will slowly
but surely lose the rich languages of opposition, like that embodied in
Christian theological anthropology.
Notes
1. This chapter draws on my topic,
Who Are We?
as well as an essay written
as a participant in a three-year study group headed by Professor William
Schweiker of the University of Chicago Divinity School on “Property and
Possession.”
2. The United States is clearly my focus, although much, if not all, of what I say
is applicable to the developed or, in John Paul II's terms, the “superdeveloped
cultures of consumption” of the West.
3. Abortion on demand at any stage of pregnancy and the death penalty would
be the two prime candidates here. This chapter's length is such that I will not be
able to discuss these in full.
4. Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis
1-3
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997).
5. This is not the time and the place to unpack ethical naturalism and moral
realism. Suffice it to say that I am committed to the view that there is a “there
there,” that there are truths to be discerned about the world, and that the world
isn't just so much putty in our conceptually deft hands. The world exists
independent of our minds, but our minds possess the wonderful capacity to
apprehend the world—up to a point, given the fallibility of reason.
6. One example would be the work of philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson,
known for her current support of physician-assisted suicide, but who first made
her reputation by providing justifications for abortion by analogizing from a
woman hooked up during her sleep to a violinist for whom she was then required
to provide life support, to a woman in relationship to the fetus she is carrying.
Thompson claimed that the woman would be within her rights to unhook the
violinist, even if it meant the violinist's death; similarly, a woman is not required
to carry a fetus to term. I have never understood why a reasonable person would
find this argument compelling. Fetuses do not get attached covertly but emerge
as a result of action in which the woman is implicated. As well, the fetus's
dependence on the mother for sustenance for nine months is part of the order
of nature—it simply is the way humans reproduce. There are many ways to
sustain violinists in need of life support, and an adult violinist is scarcely anal-
ogous in any way to the life of a human being in situ.
7. Robin Lovin,
Niebuhr and Christian Realism
(Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1995), 123.
8
.
Ibid., 126.
