This post was written by Mark Hansard on October 15, 2008
In “Down on the Transplantations,” Anita Kuhn, an editor for Touchstone Magazine, reviews a recent article from the New England Journal of Medicine about the definition of patient death and when it is ethical to remove a patient’s organs for transplant. According to Kuhn, the NEJM authors admit that the definition of patient death has been changed to allow more favorable conditions for organ transplants. The old dead donor rule (”cold, blue and stiff”) is no longer in use because in the 1960’s it was changed to “devastating neurologic injury.” This definition, commonly referred to as “brain death,” allowed the organs to be removed from a body when they were still in use. Often, organs die when the patient dies, and so are not useful for transplant. But brain-dead patients still have functioning organs, and their bodies appear alive–they metabolize, excrete waste, and even mature sexually. This, of course, has raised ethical questions in the minds of some ethicists and medical practitioners about removing the organs from such a patient.
Therefore, some experts have proposed a definition of “cardiac death,” in which the patient’s heart is not operative for three to five minutes. But this also has ethical difficulties, as it is possible to revive a patient’s heart even after five minutes of ceased activity. Kuhn writes that this often leads to an ethically inconsistent position in which “irreversible cessation of cardiac function,” comes to mean “we won’t try to resuscitate.”
Interestingly, Kuhn goes on to note that the NEJM authors, instead of retreating to the old dead donor rule because of ethical problems with the new rules, instead say that the problem has been the dead donor rule itself. What is needed, they say, is informed consent ahead of time, either from the patient or the patient’s family, that the organs can be removed even from “irreversible neurologic injuries that do not meet the technical requirements of brain death.” Kuhn gives an interesting analysis and critique of this view, which definitely worth reading here.
This post was written by Patrick Rist on November 29, 2007
Marxism was supposed to produce the “New Man.” He’s a little late, but the New Man may be emerging in communist China.
A recent Reuters story (found here) describes the younger generation of twenty-somethings found in the wealthier districts of China. Almost all of them were raised as an “only child,” and evidently display many of the narcissistic, self-centered personality traits long associated with children without siblings – at least in popular lore. (I should probably add here that some of my best friends are only children.)
The article specifically focuses on the widespread (and quite casual) failure of marriages among this group. With the Chinese economy booming, and personal options and choices expanding exponentially, many Chinese simply can’t be bothered by the necessary give-and-take involved in sustaining a marriage. Considering the needs of another person is, after all, something with which they have had no previous experience. Divorce has become completely un-stigmatized in this echelon of society and marriages sometimes last only a few weeks.
Cohabitation is on the rise, and even extra-marital sex (quaintly called “cheating” by some in American society) is becoming accepted. All of these changes are an enormous departure from the Confucian ideals that have guided Chinese society for centuries.
To give the Marxists their due, I don’t think this is what they had in mind when they predicted the New Man. But is it possible that what is happening in China represents something actually new? A non-Western, and hence, non-Christian society passing from traditional mores to a post-modern, self-centered ethic – essentially within the span of one lifetime; other examples of this would be hard to find.
This cultural change presents something of a challenge to those of us who maintain that the way of living described here is contrary to human flourishing, and damages our souls. While perhaps true, convincing the young affluent Chinese would be a hard sell. They have no residual common moral ground in which such claims would make sense, even less than young affluent Americans.
Most of us Christians want to believe in natural law. We all take great comfort from Lewis’ arguments for a universal moral code in Mere Christianity. Yet a new generation of essentially amoral Chinese, living intently focused on material and sexual desire, would seem to present a great challenge to these notions. Perhaps we need less theory and more real life, hard case examples of seeing natural law apologetics in action.
Almost all of us know Chinese here in the US, either graduate students visiting, or professors. Perhaps this Reuters article could be a way to start a discussion of mores and morals. Of course, one should avoid an opener like, “What a selfish, immoral lot you Chinese are!”
Rather, one could ask:
– Have you seen examples of what the article describes? Do you think it is accurate?
– What are the implications of these trends for China’s future?
– Does it matter? Are some ways of living better than others? How does one decide that?
This post was written by Patrick Rist on November 8, 2007
“Agency” is one of those words (like “hegemony”) that tend to identify one as either an academic or an intellectual wannabe. Here I mean it to be the ability to act, or perhaps the origin of action. It often refers to personal decision as the origin of one’s actions.
Agency has been under attack in academic circles for much of the late modern age. These attacks have come from both the “nature” and “nurture” camps. “Nurture” was the first to take a stab. Thirty or forty years ago the public first became aware of the debate concerning whether one’s upbringing exerted such an influence upon one’s behavior that personal responsibility was questionable. Skinner’s behaviorism was both an originator and the terminal point of such speculation.
More recently, “nature” has made the strongest arguments against agency. With the advent of neuroscience, the mapping of the human genome, and the rise of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, hardly a week goes by that another impetus for human action is not supposedly found “in the genes,” or located in a part of the brain.
What has driven this impulse to debunk agency and its sibling, free will? It is difficult to ascribe merely scientific curiosity, particularly when one sees the highly reductionistic explanations for behavior, and the equally irresponsible speculations about the social implications of some “findings.”
It is curious that a society so obsessed with personal autonomy and expressive individualism would embrace explanations that essentially negate both choice and achievement. One suspects that our fellow citizens would only accept such opinions from those in lab coats, the vestments of our new priests.
How are Christians to view agency? Here are some ideas that may be worth contemplation:
1. The biblical picture of the person simply assumes that agency is real. We are personally responsible for our decisions; we are culpable for our sins. Calvinists and conservative Arminians find common ground here.
2. At the same time, though, we do not sacrifice agency and responsibility by acknowledging that environmental factors play a part in our choices, or that biological factors in the brain and our genes influence behavior.
3. The crucial point that must be maintained, however, is that ultimately neither nature nor nurture fully explain (or excuse) human moral choices.
I’ll have a few more thoughts along these lines in my next entry.
This post was written by Patrick Rist on August 23, 2007
Recently I watched a PBS program on the ongoing “water wars” in the American West. Specifically, this program was about the burgeoning growth of Las Vegas, NV, its voracious appetite for water, and its push to acquire water from the sparsely populated, and mostly agricultural northern part of the state.
One northern Nevada citizen expressed a view that was simultaneously commonsensical and naïve: he said that a city like Las Vegas should limit its growth to its available water resources.
On one hand, this would make sense (putting aside for the moment the obvious fact that by that standard, there really shouldn’t be a city where Las Vegas is). But on the other hand, it struck me that there was nothing so antithetical to the “American Creed” than the idea that we might somehow be limited by our natural surroundings.
When I say the “American Creed,” I’m being a bit facetious. But I think we know intuitively that there are certain ideas or concepts that are either broadly true of American life and history, or that we like to believe about ourselves. These are largely unexamined, widely-accepted values or goods – notions like “success,” “individualism,” “progress,” and the like.
As with any creed, along with the things we believe, there are also a number of things we cannot abide – and I would argue that the possibility of “limits” is one of them. It seems too negative to Americans to suggest that there might be or should be a limit to economic expansion, to individual choice, to personal success. We live in a nation that was founded on the principles of self-government, unbridled by inherited privilege, and on edge of a seemingly limitless wilderness waiting to be settled. We come by our abhorrence of limits honestly.
So far in the history of our nation, science and technology has enabled us to ignore limits – particularly in the natural environment. Another part of the American Creed is the “can-do attitude.” The call of President Kennedy to put a man on the moon may have led directly to the automatic response of “We will rebuild!” in New Orleans after Katrina. It would have been seen as “un-American” to ask, “Wait a minute – do we really want a city this far under sea level?” It would have certainly been politically suicidal.
Now we see the momentum of science encouraging the idea that limits simply don’t exist, particularly in the realm of genetics. If it can be done, it should be. To call this into question is like the Pope refusing to look through Galileo’s telescope.
And yet if we are interested in being Christian before being American, we need to look carefully at the concept of limits from a biblical perspective. The story of the Fall would seem to imply that we will inevitably encounter limits in our lives; the story of the Tower of Babel would seem make it explicit.
God’s law is rife with limits, which is why it is so hateful to the unregenerate. What could be more limiting, for example, than to be told that you should only have sex with one person in your entire life? But if God’s law is a major clue to his very character, then what does it tell us about how he views the concept of limits?
Nor are limits unknown in the New Testament. There is “no other name” but that of Jesus by which we can be saved; an inconvenient truth if there ever was one.
All this is merely prologue – it doesn’t answer the specifics of what limits are appropriate and which aren’t. My point is that Christians should not be allergic to entertaining the idea of limits in the personal and public spheres.
· If you’re like me, you may view those who openly talk about limits (particularly environmentalists) as having unrealistic and even anti-human political agendas. Is this always true, though?
· How might the American dislike of limits affect how we hear the gospel?
· How do we balance a legitimate concern about limits with political freedom?
· Is the notion of limits something that we can introduce into our classrooms? How would it interact with notions of personal responsibility and agency?
This post was written by Matt Bazemore on May 3, 2007
In my last post, I described how Moral Irrealism is rooted in the scientific worldview, and why it makes actual moral truth impossible. Thus, what is the Moral Realist’s response to Moral Irrealism and the absolute conception?
Moral Realism maintains that ‘appearance’ qualities are real for two main reasons. First, the absolute conception is a theory selected upon subjective criteria. The criteria for the absolute conception are dependent upon the human perspective and our preferences for organizing data. Thus, the absolute conception is ultimately subjective.
Second, the absolute conception explains away most of our experience. Qualities such as color, smell and beauty are nothing more than illusions. Before moving on, think about everything that is included in that last statement. This means the majority of our experience is illusory, i.e. in the realm of appearance. This seems to be too high a price to pay for holding to the absolute conception.
Moral Realism provides the following account for our perception of qualities dependent upon a particular perspective: our mode of perception does not produce qualities but enables us to discern them in reality. The range of modes of perception is limited by one’s capacities. If one lacks the capacity to smell, then that mode of perception is unavailable. The absolute conception does not provide an account explaining why experienced ‘appearance’ qualities, which we understand to be in reality, are unreal. Thus, there are good reasons to maintain that our common experience of light, color, smell and beauty is of a mind-independent reality.
Therefore, the tragedy at Virginia Tech is evil in a mind-independent sense. When call the events “evil,” we are using “evil” in a descriptive sense, not an evaluative sense that is dependent upon the perspective of the speaker.
I would like to say that my heart aches for the community surrounding Virginia Tech in the recent killings. It is clear that what happened was truly wrong and atrocious, and I hope the relevance of this discussion is clearly seen in light of these recent events.
Part 1 Part 2
This post was written by Matt Bazemore on April 30, 2007
In my previous entry we were left with two major positions concerning ethics: Moral Realism and Moral Irrealism. Today we will examine how Moral Irrealism analyzes the meaning of moral statements.
Moral Irrealism makes a distinction between descriptive and evaluative meaning that is found in every statement of value, such as “That is cruel.? Descriptive meaning refers to the meaning that is not dependent upon any particular perspective. In other words, multiple people could agree with its meaning, because something external to the speaker is being described.
Evaluative meaning is dependent upon a particular perspective, i.e. multiple people would have differences about the same thing, such as the taste of a particular dish. This distinction of meaning is grounded in what is called the absolute conception of the world. When Christians hear the word, “absolute? in relation to ethics, their usual response is gladness. Celebrations would be premature in this case, as will soon become evident.
The absolute conception seeks a description of reality not dependent upon any particular perspective. This is related to scientific methodology. Science seeks to provide us with a picture of the world that is independent of any particular perspective. As scientists study the world they do not find qualities such as “goodness? and so conclude that values are of appearance and not reality. Thus, the absolute conception places objective qualities in reality, and subjective qualities in appearance.
The Moral Irrealist can affirm as actually existing in reality only those qualities that science deems descriptive, and not evaluative. Evaluative qualities, while perhaps containing or causing a high level of emotive content, do not really refer to anything outside of the person who is making an observation. They can’t – “good? and “bad? aren’t really “there?.
The success and prevalence of the scientific worldview adds much weight to the Moral Irrealist position. But if Moral Irrealism is true, then moral truth is impossible. This implies that those who find the recent shootings at Virginia Tech horrifying are feeling an affective response to an opinion and not the truth of the situation. Despite this rather damning implication however, the Moral Realist still needs to provide a response to the absolute conception.
Part 1 Part 3
This post was written by Matt Bazemore on April 27, 2007
I recently read Moral Vision: An Introduction to Ethics (Blackwell Publishing, 1988) by David McNaughton. This work not only introduces ethics, but it’s richly satisfying food for the soul.
Moral Vision begins with the question Where are properties of value located? Properties, or qualities, of value refer to things such as beauty, ugliness, right and wrong. How we answer this question is profoundly important, as I will seek to demonstrate over the next couple of entries.
To begin, let’s say Sam observes two children attempting to light a gasoline-soaked cat on fire. Sam states, “That is cruel,? and acts to stop the children. Sam’s action may be analyzed two ways. The first takes the statement “That is cruel? as referring to the children’s action. Sam discerns the quality of cruelty and a belief is formed. To discern means the ability to select a quality and refer to it by stating a belief. The belief is true if and only if it corresponds to reality, the mind-independent world. In discerning a moral fact, Sam’s action is justified to bring about a different state of affairs, such as preventing the children from further harming the cat. This analysis that places the locus of value (both moral and non-moral) in reality is called Moral Realism. The Moral Realist position in which Sam’s belief alone is sufficient for motivating one to action is called Cognitivism. Moral Realism provides a basis for our experience of moral truth, moral justification and moral observation in reality.
The second position analyzes Sam’s discernment as referring to himself. Sam’s statement has two kinds of meaning: the factual or descriptive meaning that refers to the observation, and the evaluative meaning that refers to an emotive state in Sam. This would be called Moral Irrealism, the analysis of moral statements that places qualities of value in the subject. Moral Irrealism would include “Sam felt a strong disfavor? to explain why he acted. This position in which the emotive quality, which does not have a truth value, is a necessary constituent to explain Sam’s action is called Non-Cognitivism. Thus, moral truth is not possible.
This second view is a serious position, and is one way to ground properties of value on a scientific and physicalist (or atheistic) worldview. In my next post, I will explain how the modern scientific perspective undergirds Non-Cognitivism, and why it is not a robust view to hold.
Part 2 Part 3
This post was written by Patrick Rist on April 19, 2007
The Wendell Berry short story, “Watch With Me,” from the collection by the same name (1994), revolves around the character Thacker Hample, a person given to “fits” and other bizarre behaviors, who one day picks up a neighbor’s loaded shotgun and wanders off into the woods after mentioning that he may kill himself.
The neighbor, Tol Proundfoot, begins following Thacker to make sure he doesn’t harm himself or anyone else. He sends word to other neighbors to come help, and for the rest of a long day and long night, Tol and his companions follow and watch Thacker from a distance as he meanders across their rural county.
This is not a lark for these men. They are aware that there is potential danger involved in what they are doing. They hardly speak to one another as they follow, and rarely even walk together. By the end of the story, which ends, if not happily, at least without tragedy, they are tired and hungry and behind in their work on their farms. Yet they do what they do without resentment and without complaint.
The men do not follow and watch after Thacker because he is their friend. Thacker is simply too backward and odd to be anyone’s friend. Rather, the men commit themselves to their task because both they and Thacker live together. In some way that probably none of them could defend or even articulate, this forces upon them an obligation to Thacker and to his welfare.
Thacker walks on alone. Yet he is far from alone.
Like most of Berry’s fiction, “Watch With Me” takes place before mass culture infiltrated every corner of our continent and our psyches. And also like most of his fiction as well as his nonfiction, Berry here holds up an ideal that we may not even be able to recognize, much less affirm.
The ideal is one of connectedness, or community, and the inherent obligation that arises from simply living in proximity to another. This is a hard teaching, and few of us can accept it.
Because for all the talk of “community” or “unity” today, both within the church and outside it, the simple fact is that we like living in a mass society. We like anonymity. We like going to the store and not having to speak to anyone or be recognized. We like not having to be involved with our neighbors’ lives, or even know their names, if we’d rather not. Who has time for it? We can now choose with whom we want to have “community,” and if it becomes messy or somehow disappointing, we can move on to someone else and have “community” with them.
And all this runs along rather smoothly, but with hidden costs. These costs become devastatingly visible when a Thacker Hample gets it in his addled brain to kill a few dozen of us.
Berry, who pastor and theologian Eugene Peterson actually calls a prophet, challenges us to hold some of our most unquestioned ways of life at a critical distance and try to see how odd they are in comparison to how most of the human race has lived through the centuries. But this is hard, and sometimes sounds like blame. It is not blame, but it is an attempt at being as clear-eyed as possible.
Is society somehow to blame for the horrors perpetuated at Virginia Tech this week? Of course not. We must affirm personal culpability; to do otherwise is simply reprehensible, especially in light of subsequent information discovered about the murderer.
But we must also acknowledge that we live in a society in which mobility, anonymity and sheer numbers of people make it possible for someone to be completely unknown by and disconnected to anyone else. This type of society has become normative for us; it is difficult to imagine any other way. We sometimes lose sight of its true perversity, and we seldom think about what it could be doing to us.
Neither you nor I nor Wendell Berry can do very much about mass society and its attendant anonymity. The fix is in, and it’s unlikely that a nation of 300 million is going to become less mass-oriented or impersonal. But for the sake of our own souls, perhaps we should be less glib about it, and more willing to contemplate the possibility that our “tastes” have become corrupted, like someone who prefers watching TV to walking in the woods, or McDonalds to a home cooked meal.
If we prefer anonymity to connection, if we prefer diversion to actually getting involved in others’ lives, and if we are content with cheap and easy “community-lite,” then perhaps we have been too deeply conditioned by our frenetic culture. Perhaps there is something there of which we should repent. We should ask our gracious God to change our tastes, and to protect us from the consequences of a system in which we have been all-too-willing participants.
This post was written by Patrick Rist on September 13, 2006
Many commentators and social critics have observed that we live in a time of increased “weightlessness” – in which the acceleration of our daily experience tends to empty out our lives of substance and meaning. The constant press of the next thing we have to do — the next meeting we have to attend — the next place we have to be — the next appointment in our Treo – all seem to detract from our ability to see any of it having any particular meaning. It seems to be merely the “price of admission” into modern existence.
I’ve recently been reading Orthodoxy by CK Chesterton, written in 1908. It was only an aside, but it was ironic to read Chesterton’s abhorrence of the busyness of the England of his day, almost a century ago. So this impression has been with us for a while.
And yet one wonders if the particular kinds of activities that occupy us today are unique and especially potent in flattening out our world. There have been several articles in the news about “Blackberry Thumb” – the malady that comes from punching in too many messages on the PDA/phone device. My point is not the ailment, but the mania about email that causes the ailment.
Email, which I use every day like everyone else, is a careless, almost substance-less form of expression. If you received a written letter with the same punctuation, spelling and sentence structure as the typical email message, you’d think you were corresponding with an imbecile. I’m not advocating that we construct our email with the precision of a legal document or the style of Dr. Johnson; I’m merely raising the possibility that the use of this media has the effect of downgrading language and language’s attendant meaning.
The internet as a whole probably has the same effect – and the irony that I’m writing this for a website does not escape me here. But I don’t think that it is possible to overestimate the impact that the Web has had on our perception of knowledge and information. Along with the hyper-abundance, there has been a corresponding downgrading of the importance and meaning of individual units of knowledge. How does one examine an individual raindrop in a hurricane?
These phenomena, or perhaps the uncritical embrace of these phenomena, constitute what might be the unique worldliness of our age. Not all Christians throughout the centuries have been learned. Perhaps only a minority could have been accurately called contemplative – either by nature or profession. But never has the regnant world system and its practices been so aggressively set against either learning or contemplation.
And at the height of irony, one sees the modern research university perpetuating the same mindset. In its emphasis on production and achievement, the University merely reflects the culture of business and busyness that we see all around us.
Well, what can be done? Sad to say, there’s no known cure. But, by the grace of God – and let us never regard that phrase as a cliché – I believe that we can be agents of resistance.
We can be models of remembrance – mindful that there are other ways of living, other ways of thinking, other ways of ordering our lives that are not beholden to the latest and greatest technology or trend.
We can be models of intentionality – using discernment and wisdom in the choices we make, utilizing technologies when appropriate and taking a pass on them when not.
And we can be models of excellent difference – choosing, for example, to use proper English, even if no one else is; choosing to read actual books, or even [GASP!] write actual letters.
These are all profoundly conservative activities, but they are not conservative in the political sense. They are conservative in the same way that monks copying classical texts in the Dark Ages were conservative. Who knows – future generations may call us blessed in the same way.
These different “models” are probably worth exploring further — with examples and rationales. We’ll try to revisit these topics in later Antecedents.
This post was written by Patrick Rist on August 30, 2006
Recently, Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard scientist E. O. Wilson wrote an article in The New Republic asking Christians to take environmentalism seriously. Although it requires registration, you can read the article here.
Normally, we here at Antecedents do our own commentary, but in this case I’d like to point you to a excellent, even-handed response to Wilson’s piece by Dr. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, KY.
Mohler commends Wilson for making this “amazing overture” and while acknowledging that it may contain potential problems for orthodox Christians, believes we should seriously consider Wilson’s proposals.
Here are some questions that come to mind for Christians in academia:
– Some commentators have said that environmentalism has replaced communism and socialism as the cause celeb of all “right thinking” people. Do you think this is true? Does it matter from a Christian perspective?
– There already voices within evangelicalism for “Creation Care” or other Christian-themed environmentalism. How should a biblical view of care for the environment differ from secular or pagan versions?
– Several have written about the doctrine of Creation and its engagement with modern environmentalism. What about the doctrines of law and grace — where do you see these issues relating to Christian environmentalism?
And here are some questions for your secular colleagues who are concerned about the environmentalism:
– Why should a secularist care what happens to the earth if they aren’t going to be around to suffer for it? On what grounds does a pure naturalist have concern for generations yet unborn? Why is selfishness regarded with disapprobation by those who don’t acknowledge any external standard? In other words, what makes selfishness wrong?
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