Engaged Disciplines: Invocations from History

by Denis Larrivee

The publication of Elio Sgreccia’s weight 4rth edition of Personalist Bioethics testifies not simply to the urgency of bioethics as the discipline for a technological age, but also to the discipline’s enduring effort to come to terms with its modus operandi; that is, to respond to bioethics’ twin queries: what value is being claimed for an ethical praxis that needs evolving, and what existential reality is this value applied to. The text has received the endorsement of the USA’s National Catholic Bioethics Center for its principled approach to and consistency with intellectual tradition. Covering some 830 pages in its paper bound version it serves as more than a primer on the evolution of the discipline, entailing a substantive intellectual effort aimed at linking the discipline’s epistemic development to an objective grounding in the nature of reality. In this vein the text considers not only the rationale for arguments that underpin value and contingency, that is, the twin queries - the text specifically invokes the personalist normative conclusions of the Christian tradition and the Aristotelian-Thomistic insights on what is being sited - but conducts a dialogical praxis with leading contemporary models that have evolved widely outside this framework. Given the ongoing stream of epistemological findings that continue to emerge from the sciences, this is a praxis with considerable potential for variation in trajectory, which Sgreccia considers vis a vis the science of genetics.

A la Sgreccia, bioethics emerged as a distinct discipline no more than a few decades ago with the publication of Van Rensselaer Potter’s seminal article on Bioethics, the Science of Survival. Proposing the unification of the knowledge taken from biology with that rooted in a study of human values, the article reflected Potters perception that the vast panorama of life was placed at risk by the sterile a-value approach of the sciences to life. Coming on the heels of the genetic triumphs of the 1960’s, like the deciphering of the genetic code, Potter conceived of bioethics as a route to preserving the natural world, mediated through the appropriation of value. The claim to invoke human values to this broad dominion, however, the addressing of the second of the two queries, had the normative consequence of flattening an anthropomorphic hierarchy. Indeed, the consequences are now seen in such varied communities and theories as the ecoethicists and actor network theory, where every river and fish is now an end, a revelation in normative outcome, of the otherwise hidden, intrinsic mutual and reciprocal influence of answers to the two queries that were exerted on one another. Faced with this horizontalizing Andre Helleger later proposed to narrow the contingency range by restoring the privileged normative character of the human being in medical intervention and research experimentation. Helleger, thereby, established a disciplinary pattern that has since marked the field’s evolution, clarifying the twin queries and logically deducing their mutual influence.

Sgreccia’s text adheres to this pattern. Grounding is crucial to the text’s conclusions, which thus premises the existential reality of the person as both source and locus of value, revealed through its physical manifestation. This has also meant that in the absence of the physical manifestation there would be no reality for which normative privileging could be accorded. While here reaffirming the generality of the twin query approach to an ethics of biology, like Van Rensselaer Potter and Hellegers, Sgreccia, significantly, substantially reaffirms the centrality of the logical necessity of the physical reality of the human form. Hence, while he underscores the human personalist anthropology as the basis for normative privileging, as a matter of metaphysics, and especially as a pragmatic art, the normative science of bioethics cannot be divorced from the siting of its contingency - implicit in Helleger’s stance. The physical manifestation, in effect, reveals how the physical reality structures the form that can then be normatively privileged. Actions are thereby probative, if and only if they are administered to the physical form, either contravening its nature or its unity.

This is a position similarly advanced by Karol Wojtyla, whose investiture of normative weight specifically inheres in the corporality of the human form (Veritatis Splendor)

…against a manipulation of corporeity which would alter its human meaning...on the grounds that the ...nature of the human person is in the unity of the body and soul ...that stand and fall together...

In other words, like Sgreccia, Wojtyla ascribes to the physicality of the normative terrain the capacity to determine value specifically in view of its human siting. Significantly, in charting this terrain Wojtyla is claiming that the corporal reality specifically assists in the acquisition of its normative valuation. This is a broader claim that stems from the unity of the individual who is epistemically manifest, and has bearing for the current state of bioethics as a normative science, which, once again, is attempting to address the twin queries of normative investiture and value contingency.

In what promises to be a quantitative leap in the new bioethics, that is, from the traditional question of how and why the human anthropology is normatively privileged, the current questioning concerns what a human anthropology inheres in. This is a logical prior for the normative science of bioethics generally, but is peculiarly suited to its most recent evolution in praxis, which is concerned with the biological substrate most intimately linked to human ontology, neuroethics. Wojtyla’s claim is significant for neuroethics for specifically linking the human and personalist meaning to its emergence from the corpus, a point taken up in a lengthy series of lectures given in the early years of his chief office.

Though he originally elaborated this meaning in terms of a reflection on its phenomenal character, he understood it through its intrinsic unity, that is, linked to its physical manifestation. By extension, it seems fair to say that predicated on the unity from which predicable human properties flow, the nervous system of the corpus specifically assists in structuring the personalist reality.

Unsurprisingly, Wojtyla’s presupposition - of an a priori metaphysic structure from which the corporal reality predicates - distinguishes itself from much of current neuroethics, Cartesian inspired, and with a posteriori presuppositions that segregate privileged properties from their ‘source’. Lockean descendants, like Extended Mind Theory, for example, segregate the subject from a defined corporal structure. The rupture, that is also a rupture of the twin queries, significantly, wholly modifies actionable standards that can be applied to intervention. Bad thinking and bad action, so to speak, hand in hand, and a caution on the consequences of the reciprocal character of the twin queries.

Recent efforts to imbue neuroethics with a personalist normative privileging, like that of a recently appearing article in the personalist journal Quien, on the other hand, begin with a welcome premise. Like Wojtyla and Sgreccia they propose to the question of normative privileging the ascription of ‘personalist’ and so, thus, they address the first of the twin queries. Yet in the effort - and perhaps daunted by the complexity of the physical nature at hand, there is the sense of a more ethereal and unbound contingency, that is a phantom of what the 2nd query is beholden to. This question of status, conversely, is unlike Wojtyla and Sgreccia, introducing, perhaps, an unintended plasticity to contingency, which likely will ignore the reciprocity the twin queries seek. Hence, there seems an invocation in trending personalism, intellectually applied more broadly, of a caution embedded in the historicity of the ethical discipline, that what once was may not forever be.