Most organized religions have indicated a level of support for organ donation including the diagnosis of death by the brain criterion. Organ donation is seen as a gift of love and fits within a communitarian ethos that most religions embrace. The acceptance of the determination of death by the brain criterion, where it has been explained, is reconciled with religious views of soul and body by using a notion of integration. Because the soul may be seen as that which integrates (...) the human body, in the absence of any other signs of human functioning, loss of integration is considered to be an indication that soul and body have separated. To some extent this view would seem to be informed by an Aristotelian notion of the soul, but it fits well enough with religious notions of the person continuing after death. There have been several developments internationally that indicate that the acceptance of so-called ‘brain death’ by organized religions has been challenged by new developments including the acceptance of a lesser standard than loss of all brain function and a rejection by the US President's Council on Bioethics of the notion of loss of integration as an explanation of death by the brain criterion. (shrink)

The practical problem of how to conduct oneself as a Christian and a Philosopher or Bioethicist in public debate an when asked to be engaged in government committees is difficult. One solution that has had some support has been to approach the issues on the grounds of our natural law tradition but understood anthropocentrically – the ultimate end is not communion with God by integral human development. This is often called New Natural Law (NNL). This separation of Philosophy and Theology (...) has had its critics and most notably the current Poe and his immediate predecessor. In their own writing addressed to people of goodwill, they took a different approach that was essentially Christocentric and involving s close partnership between Philosohy and Theology. In my own experience over thirty years of public involvement in Bioethics, I have discovered that the NNL approach has two overwhelming problems. What is offered to the secular dialogue, as an anthropocentric natural law, often sounds false to secular others because we propose something guided by our beliefs, but failing to acknowledge that contribution. However something that I have discovered latterly in that approach is in fact false by our own standards. By the strictures we impose on our contribution we in fact ignore the New Law instituted by Christ, the law of love. The New Natural Law (NNL) Project has proved to be a failure where it has been tried, and, I know realize, was doomed from the outset, because in being anthropocentric it was essentially lacking and the answers that it gave to problems were often unsatisfactory because lacking love and the particular demand of needing to be capable of being oriented towards God, the God of love. The NNL approach tended to produce a casuistry that was too liberal and too lacking in understanding of the essential role that affectivity plays in our lives, created as we are in the imago dei, in the image and likeness of the God of love. Such a morality demands much more than anthropocentricism can demand. In recognizing these difficulties I propose instead a more pragmatic approach that reflects a partnership between Philosophy and Theology as espoused by the Second Vatican Council, and by Pope’s Benedict XVI and Pope John Paul II, and which engages the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Servais Pinckaers. An approach that I have tried with some success in chairing government committees. (shrink)

This paper explores the determination of death as it pertains to ethical decisions about organ and tissue donation. The Church holds that death can be diagnosed on the basis of evidence showing the complete cessation of all brain function and the corresponding loss of integration of the body. On the basis of evidence presented by D. Alan Shewmon and others, influential secular bodies have rejected the integrationist view, arguing instead for a much more liberal view that a loss of spontaneous (...) breathing and loss of consciousness are sufficient for a diagnosis of death; that is, some brain function may continue after death. New laws and guidelines in various countries are based on this mode-of-being view. The author defends the Church’s integrationist view, arguing that loss of all brain function means loss of integration in the intercommunicative sense that pertains to the separation of the life principle, or soul, from the body in death. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 10.3 (Autumn 2010): 491–514. (shrink)

The author was consulted by two Catholic schools in separate cases of a student and a teacher preparing to undergo sex reassignment. Such cases give rise to special ethical and pastoral concerns. This article discusses the disorders that may lead to sex reassignment, distinguishing between con­genital disorders of sex development (intersex conditions) and gender identity disorder (gender dysphoria). It also notes the ethical differences between the correction of congenital anomalies and interventions to relieve dysphoria: in the former, treatment is meant (...) to restore as much normal function as possible; in the latter, mutilating intervention destroys what were otherwise healthy bodily functions. In Catholic schools, concern for the well-being of an affected student or teacher is required, as is a clear understanding of the condition being treated, the ethical implications of treatment, the privacy issues, the effects on other students and staff, and the effects on a teacher’s ability to give faithful witness to Catholic teaching. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 12.1 (Spring 2012): 85–97. (shrink)