Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
happiness and justice.
2
Social ethics, governed by the norm of justice, is
about defining and realizing the practices and institutions necessary to
human flourishing.
Now, in the classical conception, justice defined as giving “to each his
due” was specified according to a system of hierarchically ordered
statuses and roles, in which individual human beings were considered
innately to deserve lower or higher places—for example, woman or man,
slave or master. The obvious consequences for distributive justice were
that not all were entitled to an equal share in the basic necessities of life,
much less privileges and luxuries; nor were all entitled to a participatory
role in defining the common good of the polis.
Contemporary Christian and Western political theories of justice are
influenced by modern, post-Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality.
Christian theories are also shaped by New Testament symbols present-
ing ideals of inclusive community, such as the “Kingdom of God” and
“body of Christ.” The Christian social ethics I will propose affirms the
intrinsic sociality of the person as a keynote in analyzing the ethics of
genetic control, but it will expand the modern affirmation of the equal
worth of persons by adopting the biblically informed “preferential
option for the poor” found in more recent papal statements as well as
in liberation theology. (A secular form of the preferential option might
be affirmative action for previously excluded groups.)
Catholic social teaching affirms the goodness and moral demands of
human interdependence in a century-long series of papal encyclicals that
envisions humans as participants in the common good of society, and
enjoins all persons and societies to cooperate in society for the well-being
of all. From Niebuhr, we can profitably take the point that however much
human fulfillment and happiness may depend on cultivating, in his
phrase, “the harmony of life with life,” there is a propensity to self-
interested behavior in nature
as we find it
that constitutes a strong dis-
incentive to the formation of just social relationships and institutions.
The destructive actual propensities of human behavior may be named
theologically as “sin.” This categorization furthers a more general
point, affirmed even more strongly by Catholic social teaching than by
Niebuhr, that such tendencies are neither natural, justified, nor ultimately
necessary.
