Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
30. This foreboding also comes through in Bryan Appleyard,
Brave New Worlds:
Staying Human in the Genetic Future
(New York: Viking, 1998).
31. I cannot here deal with the commercialization of genetics, but alas, the huge
profits to be made drive much of the scientific and technological work. See, for
example, Belkin, “Splice Einstein and Sammy Glick,” 26-31.
32. Think, by the way, of what this would have done to Martin Luther King's
protest: simply stopped it dead in its tracks. For the law of the Jim Crow South
was the law of segregation. And no ethical argument can challenge the law. End
of story. A comeback would be that you need to make a legal argument to change
the law. But King's call for legal change was an ethical one. The reductive asser-
tion that law and ethics must never touch is a crude form of legal positivism or
command-obedience legal theory. What is right doesn't enter into the picture at
all.
33. Pontifical Academy for Life, “Reflections on Cloning,”
Origins
28, no. 1
(May 21, 1998): 14-16. The popular press has been filled with cloning articles.
A few include: Sheryl WuDunn, “South Korean Scientists Say They Cloned a
Human Cell,”
New York Times
, December 17, 1998, A12; Nicholas Wade,
“Researchers Join in Effort on Cloning Repair Tissue,”
New York Times
, May
5, 1999, A19; and Tim Friend, “Merger Could Clone Bio-Companies 'Creativ-
ity,' ”
USA Today
, May 5, 1999, 13A. See also Lori B. Andrews,
The Clone Age:
Adventures in the New World of Reproductive Technology
(New York: Henry
Holt, 1999).
34. But we have a solution to that one, too, don't we? We can be certain that
the creatures nobody wants, whose lives are not “worth living,” can be easily
dispatched to spare their suffering. Physician-assisted suicide, the track down
which we are moving, is, of course, part and parcel of the general tendencies I
here discuss and criticize. Although I do not focus specifically on this matter, I
recommend the following two essays for the general reader: Paul R. McHugh,
“The Kevorkian Epidemic,”
American Scholar
(Winter 1997): 15-27; and Leon
R. Kass and Nelson Lund, “Courting Death: Assisted Suicide, Doctors, and the
Law,”
Commentary
(December 1996): 17-29, See also the late Cardinal
Bernardin's “Letter to the Supreme Court,” which was appended to a friend-of-
the-court brief filed by the Catholic Health Association in a U.S. Supreme Court
case testing the appeals of two lower court decisions that struck down laws pro-
hibiting assisted suicide in the states of Washington and New York; and a brief
by the U.S. Catholic Conference, “Assisted Suicide Issue Moves to Supreme
Court,”
Origins
26, no. 26 (December 12, 1996): 421-430.
35. Leon R. Kass, “The Wisdom of Repugnance,”
New Republic
, June 2, 1997,
20.
36. There is a big discussion here yearning to breathe free, of course—namely,
the connection between beauty and truth. But it is one I cannot even begin to
enter into at this point. The truth is often described as splendid and beautiful—
Augustine's language—and God as beautiful in and through God's simplicity. The
aesthetic dimension in theology, and most certainly in ethics, is underexplored.
37. Kass, “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” 20, 21.
