THE PHILOSOPHICAL DISEASES OF MEDICINE AND THEIR CURE, 2004. Author: JOSEF SEIFERT, p. xix-xx
The present volume on the foundations of philosophy and ethics of medicine will treat, after an introduction, the general nature of medical science, three most general parts of medicine, i.e. three aspects of the physician, and the seven high goods which are the objective goals of medical care, and which to understand is a condition for grasping properly medicine itself as well as the moral drama in the choice for or against the ends of medicine, a drama which Aristotle was unable to admit — because of certain limits inherent in his eudemonistic ethics — but which we experience painfully today (chapter 1).
The foundation of any ethics, but quite particularly of medical ethics, requires a careful and in-depth study of the central value with which most medical actions are concerned and which is centrally present in some way in all the seven goods discussed in chapter 1: I refer to the dignity of the human person. The reason why an understanding of this exalted value in which also the fundamental human rights are grounded, on which, since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1946, well over 90% of all nations have expressed agreement, is particularly important for physicians, nurses and other medical professional groups, lies in the fact that they deal daily with human beings of all ages and in all kinds of physical and mental [xx] conditions. Moreover, an ethics pertaining not only to how we ought to treat human persons in their fully experienced and developed being and social presence, i.e., mature and healthy adults and developing normal children, but to how we should treat the unborn, the handicapped, the aged, the terminally ill patients, and even gametes and other cells or tissues that are somehow related to human persons, requires a lucid understanding of the nature of personal dignity and of its radically different sources and dimensions.
While we reserve a fuller treatment of human life to volume II, already volume I requires a brief examination of the nature of human life and of the person herself, the bearer of human dignity. In this context, the outlines of a philosophy of man appropriate for medicine are developed: particularly the existence of the mind and its irreducibility to the body, the irreducibility of the body to a machine, and the phenomenon of the ‘lived body’, as well as the irreducibility of the human person to any level of his or her consciousness and actions.
All of these anthropological considerations will prove indispensable for any bioethics, secular, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or other, particularly for supplying the theoretical foundations for avoiding the errors of actualistic and functionalistic concepts of the person with their devastating effects on bioethics. Regarding these ontological and anthropological issues that touch the nature of personhood (discussed and to be clarified only by philosophy but presupposed in medical ethics and in any psychology or religious creed), the mentioned forms of reductionism (of persons to bodies or to conscious experiences) will have to be refuted. They have equally serious consequences for a secular as for a religiously oriented ethics of abortion, brain death, euthanasia, etc. For however much the contents of one’s religious faith change her worldview, any person’s positions on these fundamentally philosophical issues (the substantiality of the soul, of the person, as well as her reducibility or irreducibility to conscious acts) will have the same consequences regardless of any religious positions the respective author may embrace. For depending on which ontology of the person, of the embryo, of the dying or ‘brain dead’ she holds true, any person and ethic ist, whether Christian or not, will decide ethical issues differently.