Philosophical accounts of health, disease, and illness -- Disability perspectives: critical insights and questions -- Theological resources for understanding health and disease -- Theological theses concerning health, disease, and illness.

This article uses Christopher Southgate's work and engagement with other scholars on the topic of evolutionary theodicy as a case study in the dialogue of science and Christian theology. A typology is outlined of ways in which the voices of science and the Christian tradition may be related in a science–theology dialogue, and examples of each position on the typology are given from the literature on evolution and natural evil. The main focus is on Southgate's evolutionary theodicy and the alternative (...) proposal by Neil Messer. By bringing these two accounts into dialogue, some key methodological issues are brought into focus, enabling some conclusions to be drawn about the range and limits of fruitful methodological possibilities for dialogues between science and Christian theology. (shrink)

This article explores whether and how research into biological influences on gender identity can and should inform Christian ethical reflection on gender diversity and gender nonconformity. First, the current state of genetic and neuroscientific research on gender identity is surveyed. While the scientific findings are as yet preliminary, tentative, and sometimes contradictory, researchers argue that they already give grounds for thinking that many biological factors have some influence on gender identity through complex interactions with many social and environmental factors. Next, (...) the article offers some general remarks about how natural scientific findings should—and should not—inform Christian theological and ethical reflection. Finally, three specific proposals are developed for how scientific research can and should inform Christian ethical reflection on gender identity. The article offers both a contribution to this Christian ethical reflection and a case study of how the natural sciences may be used in Christian ethics. (shrink)

A collection of papers from a conference entitled ‘Eastern Orthodox and Western Christian Approaches to Bioethics’ is presented in this issue. This Editorial introduces the papers and identifies recurrent themes and questions: first, the complex relationship between faith, ethics, law and professional practice; secondly, the modes and tasks of Christian ethics or moral theology in relation to bioethical issues; thirdly, the kinds of service that academic theologians should offer to the churches, their leaders and Christians in relevant professions; fourth and (...) finally, the continuity or discontinuity between different Christian traditions. (shrink)

This paper engages with one debate in the emerging field of neuroethics. It is sometimes claimed on the strength of neuroscientific research that our actions are causally determined and therefore not truly free, or more modestly that brain structures or processes constrain some choices and actions, raising questions about our moral responsibility for them. I argue that a Reformed account of providence, sin and grace offers an account of causation able to resist hard determinism, reframes concepts of freedom and responsibility, (...) and provides a theological perspective for evaluating medical interventions in brain activity. Thus the paper not only contributes to a neuroethical debate, but also illustrates the capacity of Reformed ethics to respond creatively to novel problems. (shrink)

Of the many futuristic prospects offered by neuroscience, one of the more controversial is ‘brain reading’: the use of functional neuroimaging to gain information about subjects’ mental states or thoughts. This technology has various possible applications, including ‘neuromarketing’ and lie detection. Would such applications violate subjects’ privacy rights? Conversely, if God knows and judges all our secret thoughts, do Christians have any stake in defending a right to mental privacy? This article argues that God’s knowledge of us is different not (...) only in degree but in kind from the knowledge sought through brain reading. This view of divine knowledge supports a theological account of privacy, richer and broader in scope than standard accounts of privacy rights, which can aid the ethical analysis of the use of brain reading technology for purposes such as marketing and lie detection. (shrink)

Of the many futuristic prospects offered by neuroscience, one of the more controversial is ‘brain reading’: the use of functional neuroimaging to gain information about subjects’ mental states or thoughts. This technology has various possible applications, including ‘neuromarketing’ and lie detection. Would such applications violate subjects’ privacy rights? Conversely, if God knows and judges all our secret thoughts, do Christians have any stake in defending a right to mental privacy? This article argues that God’s knowledge of us is different not (...) only in degree but in kind from the knowledge sought through brain reading. This view of divine knowledge supports a theological account of privacy, richer and broader in scope than standard accounts of privacy rights, which can aid the ethical analysis of the use of brain reading technology for purposes such as marketing and lie detection. (shrink)

The concepts of health and disease are foundational to biomedical ethics. This essay critiques two widely used approaches to understanding health and disease: the World Health Organization definition of health as "complete physical, mental and social well-being," and the attempts by Thomas Szasz and Christopher Boorse to define health and disease in objective, value-free terms. Drawing particularly on the thought of Karl Barth, I argue that in Christian perspective, health must be understood in terms of the goods and goals toward (...) which human life is directed, which must themselves be understood in terms of God's good purposes made known in Christ. We are called to "will to be healthy" and resist disease, but understanding what this entails in particular concrete situations requires skills and habits of attentiveness to God's command, cultivated in the context of the Christian community and its practices. (shrink)

Neil Messer brings together a range of theoretical and practical questions raised by current research on the human brain: questions about both the 'ethics of neuroscience' and the 'neuroscience of ethics'. While some of these are familiar to theologians, others have been more or less ignored hitherto, and the field of neuroethics as a whole has received little theological attention. Drawing on both theological ethics and the science-and-theology field, Messer discusses cognitive-scientific and neuroscientific studies of religion, arguing that they do (...) not give grounds to dismiss theological perspectives on the human self. He examines a representative range of topics across the whole field of neuroethics, including consciousness, the self and the value of human life; the neuroscience of morality; determinism, freewill and moral responsibility; and the ethics of cognitive enhancement. (shrink)

This paper maps the different levels of the problem of healthcare resource allocation — micro, macro and international — with reference to three cases. It is argued that two standard approaches to the issue of distributive justice in healthcare, the QALY (quality-adjusted life year) approach and the social-contract approach developed by Norman Daniels, are fundamentally unsatisfactory for reasons identified by Alasdair MacIntyre. Although the virtue theory articulated by MacIntyre and others has been influential in many areas of healthcare ethics, there (...) seems to have been relatively little discussion of the difference it might make to the problems of resource allocation. The potential of such an approach is explored in the later sections of the paper. Two apparently promising ways of bringing virtue ethics to bear on resource allocation are examined and found wanting to greater or lesser extents. Firstly, Beauchamp and Childress’s account of the virtues as a supplement to their ‘Four Principles’ is found to have little or no substantive contribution to make to this issue. Secondly, the ‘liberal communitarian’ system of resource allocation proposed by Ezekiel Emanuel, while a considerable improvement on the account of Beauchamp and Childress, remains problematic in some respects. An alternative Christian account is developed by identifying significant influences that might shape the ‘political prudence’ which would enable Christian communities to form sound judgments about distributive justice in healthcare. The paper concludes with some remarks about the relationship between this tradition-constituted account and the wider public sphere of policy-making and practice. (shrink)

This essay explores some theological implications of cognitive-science research into moral reasoning. Evolutionary theorizing argues that human morality originated as an adaptation that enabled our evolutionary ancestors to function as members of a social species. Neuroscientific experiments suggest that utilitarian responses to the moral dilemmas known as “trolley problems” involve more activity in brain areas associated with reason and less in areas associated with emotion than do nonutilitarian responses. According to Peter Singer and Joshua Greene, these two areas of research, (...) taken together, support utilitarianism. They might therefore also seem to challenge nonutilitarian theological ethics. However, drawing on Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, it is argued instead that cognitive-science research on moral reasoning could offer a valuable hermeneutic of suspicion concerning ethics as a human project. Christians can welcome this critical function as an aid in the theological reconstruction of ethics without thereby being committed to the inferences drawn by Singer and Greene. (shrink)