Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
economic expansion is “guided by a moral understanding and by an ori-
entation toward the true good of the human race, it easily turns against
man to oppress him.” Although many possess too much, “there are
others—the many who have little or nothing—who do not succeed in
realizing their basic human vocation because they are deprived of essen-
tial goods.” A couple of years later, he links the plight of “the great
majority of people in the Third World” with the “human inadequacies
of capitalism,” noting that they are deprived not only of material goods
but the education and skills necessary to gain “fair access to the inter-
national market.”
21
In
Evangelium Vitae
, the pope reiterates many of these points, empha-
sizing that, in a worldwide perspective, the affirmation of human rights
“in distinguished international assemblies is merely a futile exercise of
rhetoric, if we fail to unmask the selfishness of the rich countries which
exclude poorer countries from access to development.” This encyclical
(like others) also draws on biblical teaching, especially the example of
Jesus and his commands to love one's neighbor and serve those in need,
stressing what liberation theologians have called the “option for the
poor.”
22
Gospel themes elucidate the meaning of “solidarity,” a concept
of social unity and responsibility that the pope introduced in his first
social encyclical,
Laborem Exercens
, and that serves as a key to much
of his thinking about the common good.
23
Despite the fact that after Vatican II, papal encyclicals increasingly
rested their moral appeals on religious and biblical foundations, a basic
framework of “natural law” has never been abandoned.
24
The idea that
moral values and norms are at a basic level shared by and in principle
recognizable to all human societies is the premise that allows the Catholic
social tradition to speak in the public sphere, and to urge social, politi-
cal, and economic changes that will better serve the universal or global
common good. Neither morality nor the public order is relative to cul-
tural practices or majority opinion, but is instead grounded in “an objec-
tive moral law which, as the 'natural law' written in the human heart,
is the obligatory point of reference for civil law itself.”
25
Prescriptions
supposedly based on the natural have in some areas of morality (for
example, sexuality and the taking of innocent life) been derived in an
ahistorical, deductive, and rigid manner that does more to reveal the vul-
nerabilities of claims about “universal” morality than to demonstrate
