Defining the beginning and end of life
Names such as Quinlan, Cruzan, Kevorkian, and Schiavo have
had broad media exposure and have become a part of
American Culture. The bioethical and legal issues that
surround them, and the questions those issues raise
about the beginning and end of human life, are not
likely to be resolved in the foreseeable future. The
latest issue of The Journal of Law, Medicine, & Ethics
examines these questions and the bonds that join them in
its symposium, Defining the Beginning and The End of
Human Life: Implication for Ethics, Policy, and Law.
Within its pages, anthropologist Lynn Morgan presents beliefs
from various cultures, looking specifically at the idea
of "personhood" in different societies. "The practices
of personhood are not impersonal or abstract or
objective or simply deliberative. They are specific and
situated, and they shape us, even as we shape them," she
concludes.
In the first of two point-counterpoint discussions, Donald
Marquis discusses his widely debated secular argument
against abortion while Bonnie Steinbock provides a broad
view of the moral status of human embryos, highlighting
the strengths and weaknesses of several approaches. In
the second of the two discussions, James L. Bernat
speaks of brain death as the determination of death: a
concept and public policy that, Bernat asserts, is both
intuitive and well accepted by many societies. James
McMahan counters by distinguishing between biological
death and when a person ceases to exist.
David DeGrazia addresses President Bush's and the President's
Council on Bioethics' stand against cloning by arguing
that the pre-conscious fetus lacks the psychological
unity that might bind it to its future self. It thus
lacks substantial moral status and does not have a right
to remain alive.
In the last article of the symposium, George Khushf argues
the need to add questions of human value and purpose to
public discourse so we may better understand our
disagreements. "Because the deep questions of human
value and purpose are regarded as 'private' questions in
our society, we end up with a truncated, shallow public
discourse that never addresses what we are really
talking about," Khushf claims.