Abstract
In the first four chapters of this work I have attempted to sketch outlines of a philosophy of medicine, general ethics, and medical ethics and defended a number of content-full (‘material’) goods and ends which medicine should serve. For medicine to serve these concrete and content-full goods I have declared not only to be desirable but constitutive of medicine qua medicine.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
3_See on this Dietrich von Hildebrand, with Alice Jourdain, Graven Images. Substitutes for True Morality (New York: David McKay Company, 1957.
2nd ed. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1976).
See on this Andreas Laun, Die naturrechtliche Begründung der Ethik in der neueren katholischen Moraltheologie (Wien: Wiener Dom-Verlag, 1973).
also by the same author, “Die naturrechtliche Problematik von heute in der wertethischen Sicht Dietrich von Hildebrands,” in Die naturrechtliche Begründung der Ethik in der neueren katholischen Moraltheologie, pp. 160-230 See likewise Burkhardt Ziemske (Hrsg.), Staatsphilosophie und Rechtspolitik. Festschrift für Martin Kriele zum 65. Geburtstag (München: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1997).
Wolfgang Waldstein, “Vorpositive Ordnungselemente im Römischen Recht,” Öst. Z. öff. Recht 17 [1967].
See also Josef Seifert, “Zur Erkenntnis der Menschenrechte und ihrer axiologischen und anthropologischen Grundlagen,” in Josef Seifert (Hrsg.), Wie erkennt man Naturrecht? (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1998), pp. 65–106.
Several authors have recognized this. See, for example, Courtney S. Campbell, “The Crumbling Foundations of Medical Ethics,” Theor Med, 19(2) (January 1998): 143–152.
This author sees three books that demonstrate these crumbling foundations of medical ethics: Peter Singer’s Rethinking Life and Death. The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Tristram Engelhardt’s The Foundations of Bioethics; and Jonathan Moreno’s Deciding Together: Bioethics and Moral Consensus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
See H. T. Engelhardt., The Foundations of Bioethics. See by H. T. Engelhardt, The Foundations of Christian Bioethics, (Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger, 2000).
See on this Wolfgang Waldstein, Operae Libertorum. Untersuchungen zur Dienstpflicht freigelassener Sklaven (Stuttgart: Steiner-Verlag-Wiesbaden, 1986).
see by Wolfgang Waldstein, Das Menschenrecht zum Leben (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1982).
See likewise Martin Kriele, Recht Vernunft Wirklichkeit (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1990), pp. 71–235.
See also Burkhardt Ziemske (Hrsg.), Staatsphilosophie und Rechtspolitik Festschrift für Martin Kriele zum 65. Geburtstag. See my paper in this work: Josef Seifert, “Die vierfache Quelle der Menschenwürde als Fundament der Menschenrechte,” pp. 165-185. Engelhardt also overlooks that his denial of any ethical natural law content and his restriction of any content-full morals to religious faith-communities contradicts the repeated assertions of a natural law accessible to every human being, made in the Old and New Testament (and also in the Koran).
See T. H. Engelhardt, Jr., The Foundations of Christian Bioethics. That Engelhardt’s position entails relativism and nihilism, was also pointed out by Michael J. Wreen in his “Nihilism, Relativism, and Engelhardt,” Theor Med 19(1) (January 1998): 73–88.
This author holds, however, that Engelhardt himself is an ethical universalist, a claim with which we cannot agree except on an extremely formal level, which, however, can also not be defended successfully from Engelhardt’s own principles.
See Plato, Theaetetus, 170a-179b; Gorgias; Aristotle, Metaphysics IV; Augustine, Contra Academicos; the same author, De Libero Arbitrio. For a critique of relativism in our time see, for example, C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1947, 7th printing, 1970).
Dietrich von Hildebrand, Ethics, ch. 9; Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen; Alexander Solschenizyn, Macht und Moral zu Ende des Zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, hrsg. v. Rocco Buttiglione und Josef Seifert (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1994).
Husserl noted this in Logische Untersuchungen, but fell himself later into a transcendental relativism. See Walter Hoeres, “Critique of the Transcendental Metaphysics of Knowing, Phenomenology and Neo-Scholastic Transcendental Philosophy,” Aletheia (1978) I,1, 353–69.
See also Bernhard Irrgang, Praktische Ethik aus hermeneutischer Sicht (Paderborn/München/Wien/Zürich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2003), pp. 14 ff.
Irrgang thinks that the most central contributions of hermeneutical ethics are the insights into the historicity of human knowledge and into the circular nature of interpretation: Zentrale Erkenntnisse der philosophischen Hermeneutik sind die Einsicht in die Geschichtlichkeit des Verstehens und die Erkenntnis der Zirkelstruktur des Erkennens (ibid., p. 15). Both of these ideas can refer to authentic data that can be well explained but can also express fundamental errors. See Josef Seifert, “Truth and History. Noumenal Phenomenology (Phenomenological Realism) defended against some claims made by Hegel, Dilthey, and the Hermeneutical School,” in Diotima XI, Athens 1983, pp. 160–181.
Josef Seifert, “Texts and Things,” in Annual ACPA Proceedings (1999), vol. LXXII, pp. 41–68.
See for example Dietrich von Hildebrand, Memoiren und Aufsätze gegen den Nationalsozialismus 1933–1938, hrsg. von Ernst Wenisch (Mainz: Matthias Grünewald Verlag, 1994).
Cf. likewise Rocco Buttiglione, Augusto del Noce. Biografia di un pensiero. See also N. Leser, J. Seifert, K. Plitzner (Hrsg.), Die Gedankenwelt Sir Karl Poppers: Kritischer Rationalismus im Dialog (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1991), especially pp. 31–74, and “Diskussion,” pp. 75-82.
see also Josef Seifert, “Ideologie und Philosophie. Kritische Reflexionen über Marx-Engels ‘Deutsche Ideologie’ — Vom allgemeinen Ideologieverdacht zu unzweifelbarer Wahrheitserkenntnis“; “Die Philosophie als Überwindung der Ideologie,” in AI di là di occidente e oriente: Europa, a cura di Danilo Castellano (Napoli/Roma/Benevento/Milano: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1994), pp. 27–50.
“Frieden und Transzendenz,” in Arnold Buchholz (ed.), Kant und der Frieden in Europa. Ansätze zur geistigen Grundlegung künftiger Ost-West-Beziehungen. Bericht über eine Tagung der Ostsee-Akademie (Travemünde 12. bis 15. Mai 1991) (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1992), pp. 165–184.
See on this also Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen; Alexander Pfänder, Logik; Mariano Crespo, “En torno a los estados de cosas. Una investigatión ontológico-formal,” Anuario Filosóflco, XXVIII/1 (1995), 143–156.
and by the same author, Para una ontología de los estados de cosas esencialmente necesarios. Tesis doctoral (Departamento de Metafísica y Teoría del Conocimiento. Universidad Complutense, Madrid 1995). See also Josef Seifert, Back to Things in Themselves. See also Ludger Hölscher, The Reality of the Mind.
Aristotle, Metaphysics IV, 1008 b 13 ff. See also Josef Seifert, “Wahrheit als Orientierungspunkt für menschliche Entscheidungen,” Prima philosophia, vol. 7 (1994) H 3, pp. 289–305.
“Demokratie, Wahrheit und Gerechtigkeit. Cicero und das Problem des Pluralismus,” in H. Schuschnigg, D. Gutsmann, H. Starhemberg (eds.), König und Volk. Demokratie im Wandel der Zeit, Maximiliana vol. VI (Wien/München, Amalthea Verlag, 1992), pp. 27–51.
Max Scheler, “Vom Wesen der Philosophie und der moralischen Bedingung des philosophischen Er-kennens,” in Max Scheler, Vom Ewigen im Menschen (Erkenntnislehre und Metaphysik), Schriften aus dem Nachlaß Band II, herausgegeben mit einem Anhang von Manfred S. Frings (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1979), pp. 61–99; pp. 93-94.
“The Nature of Philosophy and the Moral Preconditions of Philosophical Knowledge,” in On the Eternal in Man, translated by Bernard Noble, 2nd ed. (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1972), pp. 67-104; pp. 98-99: for this reason every inquiry into the nature of philosophy must also begin with this problem of the order of fundamental self-evident insights. But the first and most direct self-evident insight is that already postulated in establishing the sense of the expression ‘doubt about something’ (about the being of something, the truth of a proposition, etc.): put in the form of a judgment it states that there is something (in general) or, to put it more acutely, that there is not nothing—the word ‘nothing’ here denoting not simply the not-being-anything or non-existence of a thing, but that absolute nothing whose negation of being does not ‘as yet’ discriminate in the negated being between thusness (So-sein), or essence, and existence (Dasein). The situation that there is not nothing is at one and the same time the object of the first and most direct self-evident insight and the object of the most intense, the ultimate philosophical wonder, though I grant that this emotional response cannot come to fruition until it has been preceded, among the emotional acts conducive to the philosophical attitude, by the adoption of that humility which abolishes the taken-for-granted, self-evident character of being as a fundamental fact and even undermines it as an obvious fact. This insight, then, is evident to me with invincible clarity, no matter where I turn my attention, whatever I look upon and however it be more closely determined according to secondary categories of being— whether it be quality or existence, noumenal or phenomenal, a real or objective non-real entity, an object or subject, an ideal or a resistant object, valuate or value-neuter ‘existential’ being; whether it be substantial, attributive, accidental or relational; possible, necessary or actual; timeless, purely durational, past, present or future; true (as e.g. a proposition), valid or pre-logical; purely mental and fictive (like the wholly imaginary ‘mountain of gold’ or a merely imagined feeling) or extra-mental or both mental and extra-mental. Choose where you will, with every example within one or more interlinked and overlapping ‘kinds’ of being, as with every one of these categories themselves, the clarity of this primary insight is such that it outshines everything which can in any conceivable way be brought into comparison with it. But whoever has not, so to speak, looked into the abyss of absolute nothing will indeed completely overlook the eminent positivity inherent in the insight that there is something and not rather nothing; he will begin with one or other of the perhaps no less self-evident insights which are, nevertheless, posterior and subordinate in self-evidence to this insight... See also
Max Scheler, “Theory of the Three Facts,” in Max Scheler, Selected Philosophical Essays, transl, by David R. Lachterman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, pp. 14 ff. See also the fine book by Michael D. Aeschliman,, The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1983), pp. 75 ff.
See on this Giovanni Reale and Dario Antiseri, Storia della fllosofia antica, vol. 2. See on the critique of less sophisticated forms of denying the objectivity of ethical knowledge John Barger, “The Meaningful Character of Value-Language: A Critique of the Linguistic Foundations of Emotivism.” Barger criticizes there A. J. Ayer’s emotivism and the precriptivist dimension in C. L. Stevenson’s value philosophy. According to Stevenson, value language “is emotive so as to be persuasive” (Barger, op. cit., p. 78). Barger’s critique aims at showing Ayer’s and Stevenson’s misinterpretation of value-language itself. It is thus a linguistic critique of emotivism, to serve as preface to a properly ethical and ontological critique of their standpoint. Nevertheless, it contains already in its present form many insights into the objectivity of values themselves and of their claim to objectivity, in the light of which the misinterpretations of emotivists can be seen. See also my critique of non-cognivist ethics in Josef Seifert, “Zur Begründung ethischer Normen. Einwände auf Edgar Morschers Position. Ein Diskussionsbeitrag,” in J. Seifert, F. Wenisch, E. Morscher (eds.), Vom Wahren und vom Guten. Festschrift zum achtzigsten Geburtstag von Balduin Schwarz (Salzburg: St. Peter Verlag, 1983).
“Und dennoch: Ethik ist Episteme, nicht bloße Doxa. Über die wissenschaftliche Begründbarkeit und Überprüfbarkeit ethischer Sätze und Normen. Erwiderung auf Edgar Morschers Antwort,” in ibid.
Though Karol Wojtyia charges Max Scheler with an ‘emotionalization of consciousness’, Max Scheler certainly believed, like Pascal before him, that there is also an intentional cognitive feeling of values, similarly to the immediate feeling in the sphere of our senses. See Karol Wojtyia, “Über die Möglichkeit, eine christliche Ethik in Anlehnung an Max Scheler zu schaffen,” in Karol Wojtyia/ Johannes Paul IL, Primat des Geistes. Philosophische Schriften (Stuttgart-Degerloch: Verlag Dr. Heinrich Seewald, 1980), pp. 35–326.
This was beautifully worked out by Karol Wojtyla. See Karol Wojtyía, Liebe und Verantwortung; see also Josef Seifert, “Karol Cardinal Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) as Philosopher and the Cracow/Lublin School of Philosophy.” See likewise Rodrigo Guerra López, Volver a la persona. El método filosófico de Karol Wojtyla, Prólogo de Josef Seifert, Coleccion “Esprit” (Madrid: Caparrós Editores, 2002).
and the Rodrigo Guerra López, Aflrmar a la persona por sí misma. La dignidad como fundamento de los derechos de la persona (Mãxico: Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos, 2003).
See on this Dietrich von Hildebrand, Das Wesen der Liebe, chs. 1-3. See also Karol Wojtyìa, Amore e responsabilitè, in Karol Wojtyìa, Metaflsica della persona. Tutte le opere filosofiche a saggi integrative, a cura di Giovanni Reale e Tadeusz Styczeî (Milano: Bompiani, 2003), pp. 451–777.
Rodrigo Guerra López, Afirmar a la persona por sí misma. La dignidad como fundamento de los derechos de la persona. See also Max Scheler, Wesen und Formen der Sympathie, Gesammelte Werke Bd. VII, 6. Aufl. (Bern und München: Francke Verlag, 1973), pp. 150 ff.
Cf. also Kevin W. Wildes, “Respondeo: Method and Content in Casuistry,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 1994; 19(1): 115–119.
Wildes argues against James Tallmon that medical ethics, especially casuistry, needs contents and a moral vision. Cf. also James M. Tallmon, “Casuistry, Catholicism, Ethics, Medicine, Morality,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. 1994; 19(1): 103–113.
In general, Engelhardt lacks a philosophical theory of error, as Balduin Schwarz has admirably presented it. See Balduin Schwarz, Der Irrtum in der Philosophie; see also Dietrich von Hildebrand, with Alice Jourdain, Graven Images. Substitutes for True Morality; and by the Balduin Schwarz Idolkult und Gotteskult, in Dietrich von Hildebrand, Gesammelte Werke VII (Regensburg: Josef Habbel, 1974).
See also Josef Seifert, Erkenntnis objektiver Wahrheit, Part I, ch. 3.
Hegel’s influence on the thought of H. T. Engelhardt, Jr. can be seen in many places, for example in Engelhardt’s The Foundations of Bioethics, p. 9, and especially on pp. 25-26 (note 15). See also Engelhardt, Mind-Body. A Categorial Relation (Den Haag: M. Nijhoff, 1973).
See Edmund Husserlx201C;Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” in Edmund Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921), Hrsg. Thomas Nenon und Hans Rainer Sepp, Husserliana Bd. XXV (Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster: M. Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 3–62.
See also a critique of these arguments in Josef Seifert, “Phänomenologie und Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft. Zur Grundlegung einer realistischen phänomenologischen Methode-in kritischem Dialog mit Edmund Husserls Ideen über die Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft.” See also “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science. Towards the Foundations of a Realist Phenomenological Method—in Critical Dialogue with Edmund Husserl’s Ideas about Philosophy as a Rigorous Science” (in Russian), and my “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science. Towards a Foundation of the Method of Realist Phenomenology in Critical Dialogue with Husserl’s Idea of Philosophy as a Rigorous Science” (in Czech).
See on these distinctions Alice von Hildebrand-Jourdain, “On the Pseudo-Obvious,” in Balduin Schwarz (ed.), Wahrheit, Wert und Sein. Festgabe für Dietrich von Hildebrand zum 80. Geburtstag (Regensburg: Josef Habbel, 1970), pp. 25–32.
The example regarding PVS I take from an investigation into PVS by D. Alan Shewmon.
Cf. Immanuel Kant, Über ein vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lügen (1797), in Kants Werke, Akademie-Textausgabe (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1968), vol. VIII, pp. 425–430.
Such a common global basis can be sought in real commonly accepted truths and values. See Josef Seifert, “Contribution philosophique à une paix interculturelle et interreligieuse,” in Arab League Educational Cultural and Scientific Organization (ISESCO), (ed.), Du Dialogue euro-arabe. Exigences et perspectives, Conférence (Tunis: Organisation Arabe pour l’Education, la Culture, et les Sciences, 2003), pp. 251–256.
One can also attempt to base such a universal religious community on a relativistic basis, an attempt that must fail, I think. See Hans Küng and Karl-Josef Kuschel (Hrsg.), Erklärung zum Weltethos. Die Deklaration des Parlamentes der Weltreligionen, 2. Aufl. (München/Zürich: Piper, 1996).
and Hans Küng, Weltethos für Weltwirtschaft und Weltpolitik (München: Piper, 1997).
H. T. Engelhardt, Jr., “Physician-Assisted Suicide Reconsidered: Dying as a Christian in a Post-Christian Age,” Christian Bioethics, vol. 4, no. 2 (1998), pp. 143–167, p. 148.
See Max Scheler, Liebe und Erkenntnis, in Max Scheler, Gesammelte Werke Bd. VI: Schriften zur Soziologie und Weltanschauungslehre (Bern: Francke, 1963).
See Scheler’s Essay, “Ordo amoris,” in Max Scheler, Gesammelte Werke Bd. X, 3. Aufl. (Bonn: Bouvier, 1986), pp. 345–376.
english translation by David R. Lachterman, “Ordo Amoris,” in Max Scheler, Selected Philosophical Essays (Evanston, 1973); or Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Sittlichkeit und ethische Werterkenntnis.
See on this Tadeusz Styczen, “Zur Frage einer unabhängigen Ethik,” in Karol Kardinal Wojtyła, Andrzej Szostek, Tadeusz Styczeî, Der Streit um den Menschen. Personaler Anspruch des Sittlichen (Kevelaer: Butzon und Bercker, 1979), pp. 111–175.
See also Dietrich von Hildebrand, Ethics, chs. 3, III 9. In medieval philosophy, Duns Scotus insisted—against the Thomists who held that the good is only so in relationship to appetites—that the ‘good’ belongs to things in se and ad se and that love and the affectio iustitiae does justice to their intrinsic goodness. In fact, in such a value-responding character of the will and of love Scotus sees the condition for the true rationality of the will which could never be explained by self-centered appetites which would eternally fail to relate appropriately to goods as they are in themselves. Such adequacy is only possible if love can love the good for its own sake. Only then, Scotus adds, love can be explained at all; for any authentic love of the other person affirms the other for her own sake. Only then, Scotus continues, can God be loved more than the self, which is impossible if he were only loved as source of our own happiness, in which case self-love would range supreme. Scotus also points out that the essence of rationality is adequacy: of the intellect to things as they are in themselves in truth, and of the will to good in itself. For an analysis of this point and the original texts, see Walter Hoeres Der Wille als reine Vollkommenheit nach Duns Scotus (München: 1962). See also on this J. Seifert, Essere e persona, chs. 5, 6, 9.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2004 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Seifert, J. (2004). Rational Justification of an Objective and Publicly Acceptable Bioethics. In: The Philosophical Diseases of Medicine and their Cure. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 82. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2871-7_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2871-7_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-6736-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-4020-2871-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive