HUMAN BODIES AND BODY PARTS
15th February 2004
This is a subject of much dispute among religious believers especially. There is little point in getting mired down in such disputation except that we have to talk about it because it is there, so prominently, in the wondrous realms of public talk and private agonising.
New technology can raise new moral issues and make real many conceptual possibilities that were once thought to be purely hypothetical. The conventional mantra that an is cannot generate an ought is acceptable only on the assumption that the moral ought cannot be derived from human experience and so ipso facto has to originate outside of natural life. Where is that?
The widening of is or can begets a widening of ought or ought not (using 'ought' in a moral sense). For example the famous text in Ecclesiastes to the effect that .....there is a time to heal : there is a time to kill ......... can be read as scriptural authority for the decent practice of euthanasia. This is no longer a theoretical point, (or a special point for those in extreme situations of bodily peril such as shipwreck or that of the mortally wounded after a battle) because we now have the means to inflict survival upon people (particularly when the patient is the permanently vegetative state, PVS) whereas we were formerly only able, all too easily to inflict death upon them. Survival should, in my view, never be inflicted upon a human being.
If, religiously speaking, the body is the merely temporary abode of one's ultimate self - the soul or the spirit - then it would seem that the disposal of dead human bodies is a matter of trash disposal conducted in a manner not offensive to prevailing norms generally and particularly not offensive to the norms of the personally aggrieved. (We may presume that even the most dedicated organic gardener would not put his wife's dead body in the compost heap under the legend RIP - Rot in Peace).
It would also seem, in religious terms, to be the case that God can replace, at will, any organs that have 'gone missing,' for therapeutic transplant purposes. Given that God can create anything, there is no reason why He should not let us practise therapeutic dismemberment of both the "quick and the dead" as well as cremation of the dead. It is open to Him to do what he wishes about the "ashes to ashes and dust to dust" scenario. It would equally seem to be divinely possible (if anything may be so described) for the bodily resurrection of a complete body to be accomplished even if it has been burnt or if, during life, certain parts had been removed.
Organ donation by the living ought to be ethnically blind if it is to be ethically defensible.
We certainly ought not, in my opinion, attempt, say by genetic engineering, to create inbuilt category divisions in humankind. We have no good ground for creating natural rulers and natural instruments for them to rule over. To be born of slaves is bad enough - to be born as a natural slave would be far worse.
We should not raise people merely as sources of spare parts and, moreover, people such as prisoners or the mentally retarded should not be used in this way because to do so would be non-consensual. The issue here is what do we mean by 'a person'?
Reference may be made to this question in AT No 42 article for a fuller account of an attempted atheistic answer.
Briefly, I think we should define the term person as a being (not neccessarily human - there may be extra-terrestrial people of non-human species) capable of forming relationships of reciprocal recognition, reciprocal communication at a sophisticated level, mutual feelings and the possibility of sharing experience and projections within the context of mutually acceptable parameters.
Conception is not so much an event as a process. Birth is an event (in some cases being all too obviously a daunting process too). Birth is the event that sets the new-born on the road of learning how to be a person. The unborn has not yet started on that road : the demented and the PVS patient have, most likely, lost the road and have lost the ability to rediscover it. The foetus is a pre-person : at the other end of the road is a surviving post-person. That's what I think, anyway.
On this view, the possible use of, say, stem cells, for generating donatable organs seems to me to be of no offence to proper human dignity and human cloning is not, essentially wrong - albeit not to be practised lightly. See AT No. 83 and AT No. 10 .
Please e-mail me with counter-blasts, if you wish : support would be appreciated too.
E.S..