In the face of the moral pluralism that results from the death of God and the abandonment of a God's eye perspective in secular philosophy, bioethics arose in a context that renders it essentially incapable of giving answers to substantive moral questions, such as concerning the permissibility of abortion, human embryonic stem cell research, euthanasia, etc. Indeed, it is only when bioethics understands its own limitations and those of secular moral philosophy in general can it better appreciate those tasks that (...) it can actually usefully perform in both the clinical and academic setting. It is the task of this paper to understand and reevaluate bioethics by understanding these limits. Academic bioethicists can analyze ideas, concepts, and claims necessary to understanding the moral questions raised in health care, assessing the arguments related to these issues, and provide an understanding of the different moral perspectives on bioethical issues. In the clinical setting, bioethicists can provide legal advice, serve as experts on IRBs, mediating disputes, facilitating decision-making and risk management, and clarifying normative issues. However, understanding this is only possible when one understands the history, genesis, and foundations of bioethics and its inability to provide a resolution to postmodern moral pluralism. (shrink)

This paper presents four different understandings of the family and their concomitant views of the authority of the family in pediatric medical decision making. These different views are grounded in robustly developed, and conflicting, worldviews supported by disparate basic premises about the nature of morality. The traditional worldviews are often found within religious communities that embrace foundational metaphysical premises at odds with the commitments of the liberal account of the family dominant in the secular culture of the West. These disputes (...) are substantial and ultimately irresolvable by sound rational argument because of the failure to share common foundational premises and rules of evidence. It is in light of these fundamental disagreements that there is a need to evaluate critically the claims and agenda advanced by the Convention on the Rights of the Child. (shrink)

Marx's critique of political economy as a problem-posing framework Political economy and its critique Writing in the late, Friedrich Engels drew attention ...

Moral pluralism is a reality. It is grounded, in part, in the intractable pluralism of secular morality and bioethics. There is a wide gulf that separates secular bioethics from Christian bioethics. Christian bioethics, unlike secular bioethics, understand that morality is about coming into a relationship with God. Orthodox Christian bioethics, moreover, understands that the impersonal set of moral principles and goals in secular morality gives a distorted account of the moral life. Therefore, Traditional Christian bioethics is separated from bioethics by (...) a radical difference in paradigms. (shrink)

Research ethics committees in the UK are under criticism for inconsistency in both process and opinion. As chairmen of a multicentre REC and a local REC, we felt that one possible reason was the lack of convenient, up to date guidance for chairmen, administrators, and members.We recognised that there is no shortage of material for REC members to read but it is time consuming to access and difficult to apply to questions raised by review of research projects. International bodies have (...) produced guidance; political organisations and governments have laid down …. (shrink)

Europe has taken on a new, post-Christian, if not a somewhat anti-Christian character. The tension between Western Europe's ever more secular present and its substantial Christian past lies at the heart of Western Europe's current struggle to articulate a coherent cultural and moral identity. The result is that Western European mainline churches are themselves in the midst of an identity crisis, thus compounding Western Europe's identity crisis. Christian bioethics in Europe exists against the backdrop of these profound cultural cross currents (...) that define the European condition, engender conflicts regarding the meaning of being Western European and being Christian, and bring the public significance and role of Western European bioethics, especially Western European Christian bioethics, into question. The dominant culture of the public forum is post-Christian and post-traditional, although traditional Christianity still asserts its voice. Denis Müller in his paper has clarified the choice between a traditional-fundamentalist Christian Bioethics and a revisionist, progressive Christian Bioethics. (shrink)

A community's morality depends on the moral premises, rules of evidence, and rules of inference it acknowledges, as well as on the social structure of those in authority to rule knowledge claims in or out of a community's set of commitments. For Christians, who is an authority and who is in authority are determined by Holy Tradition, through which in the Mysteries one experiences the Holy Spirit. Because of the requirement of repentance and conversion to the message of Christ preserved (...) in the Tradition, the authority of the community must not only exclude heretical teaching but heretical communities from communion. Understanding Christian bioethics requires a focus on the content of that bioethics in terms of its social context within a right-believing, right-worshipping community. Christian bioethics should be non-ecumenical by recognizing that true moral knowledge has particular moral content, is communal, and is not fully available outside of the community of right worship. The difficulty with Roman Catholicism's understandings of bioethics lies not just in its continued inordinate accent on the role of reason apart from repentance (as well as in its defining novel doctrines), but in Roman Catholicism's not recognizing that the contemporary, post-Christian age is in good measure the consequence of its post-Vatican II failure to call for a return to the traditional pieties and asceticisms of the Fathers so that all might know rightly concerning the requirements of Christian bioethics. (shrink)

Excerpt from Essays on the Religion and Philosophy of the Hindus Called by the indulgence of this meeting to a chair, which I could have wished to have seen more worthily filled, upon so interesting an occasion as the first general meeting of a Society instituted for the important purpose of the advancement of knowledge in relation to Asia, I shall, with your permission, detain you a little from the special business of the day, while I draw your more particular (...) attention to the objects of the Institution, for the furtherance of which we are now assembled. To those countries of Asia, in which civilization may be justly considered to have had its origin, or to have attained its earliest growth, the rest of the civilized world owes a large debt of gratitude, which it cannot but be solicitous to repay; and England, as most advanced in refinement, is, for that very cause, the most beholden; and, by acquisition of dominion in the East, is bound by a yet closer tie. As Englishmen, we participate in the earnest wish, that this duty may be fulfilled, and that obligation requited; and we share in the anxious desire of contributing to such a happy result, by promoting an interchange of benefits, and returning in an improved state that which was received in a ruder form. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Being a Christian involves metaphysical, epistemological, and social commitments that set Christians at variance with the dominant secular culture. Because Christianity is not syncretical, but proclaims the unique truth of its revelation, Christians will inevitably be placed in some degree of conflict with secular health care institutions. Because being Christian involves a life of holiness, not merely living justly or morally, Christians will also be in conflict with the ethos of many contemporary Christian health care institutions which have abandoned a (...) commitment to Christian spirituality. In this regard, managed care raises the special question of how Christian institutions can act morally under financial constraints and maintain their character while under the control of secular managers. This question itself raises the further question as to why health care institutions need even pose this query when there are Christian physicians and nurses who could work for less, or Christian men and women who could become sisters and brothers and work for nothing. Contemporary challenges to Christians to maintain their integrity in a post-Christian world have much of their force because Christians have failed to maintain traditional Christian spirituality. In the face of that failure, Christian physicians and nurses will find themselves in greater conflict with health care institutions, because few will any longer understand the requirements of traditional Christianity. In its place, they will have put a generic spirituality, a value-neutral understanding of the role of the health professional, and an anonymous commitment to social justice. (shrink)

Even though since 1965 the Great Cultural Revolution was basically an internal struggle in Mainland China, it coincided with a high tide of criticism toward Russian revisionism and therefore constituted a struggle for defining the ideological line of the Chinese Communist Party. As an internal struggle, the Great Cultural Revolution subjected all phases of cultural activity and personnel to a severe political grinding down so that a more uniform political consciousness of Maoism was generated as the guiding principle of the (...) nation; as an attempt to repudiate Russian revisionism and to assert the ideological identity of Maoism, the Great Cultural Revolution has helped in practice to provide a model of continuing revolution for a genuinely pursued Marxist society. In his long article, Chou Yang, who himself later became a target and victim of the Great Cultural Revolution, spelled out the latter message and hinted at the former possibility. What is even more significant is that he stressed repeatedly the importance of the role philosophy workers and social science workers must play in waging an ideological struggle against both Marxist revisionism and capitalism, on the one hand, and the importance of political leadership in the studies and works of philosophy and the social sciences, on the other. (shrink)

Long-term care is controversial because it involves foundational disputes. Some are moral-economic, bearing on whether the individual, the family, or the state is primarily responsible for long-term care, as well as on how one can establish a morally and financially sustainable long-term-care policy, given the moral hazard of people over-using entitlements once established, the political hazard of media democracies promising unfundable entitlements, the demographic hazard of relatively fewer workers to support those in need of long-term care, the moral hazard to (...) responsibility of shifting accountability to third parties, and the bureaucratic hazard of moving from individual and family choice to bureaucratic oversight. These disputes are compounded by controversies regarding the nature of the family (Is it to be regarded primarily as a socio-biological category, a fundamental ontological category of social reality, or a construct resulting from the consent of the participants?), as well as its legal and moral autonomy and authority over its members. As the disputes show, there is no common understanding of respect and human dignity that will easily lead out of these disputes. The reflections on long-term care in this issue underscore the plurality of moralities defining bioethics. (shrink)