Abstract
Gilbert Meilaender’s experience on the President’s Council for Bioethics, under President Bush, provides much fertile ground for this book, which is a synthesis of much of his thinking on bioethics and the questions of anthropology that he places right at the heart of the discipline. While taking a fairly traditional approach in terms of subjects, focusing on the beginning and end of life, Meilaender infuses the book with this key question: what does it mean to be a human person, and how does our Christian faith influence that thinking?
Meilaender starts the book with a strong defence of the place of religion in the public square, highlighting the fundamental importance of informed public involvement in debates that involve questions not just of science but of humanity more generally. He speaks compellingly of his time on the Council, which he describes as providing a place for open, honest conversation rather than the determination of policy positions, and provides a challenge to those of us in the medical profession who sometimes think of bioethics as being the realm of the professionals.
He is conservative in his outlook, in the true meaning of the word, not reactionary to change but determined to ask the fundamental questions that are sometimes left unanswered in a rush to progress. His Christian faith is ever present but his appeal to conserve and, as he describes it, show a yellow light to perceived progress is just as often an appeal to good reasoning as it is to an explicit Christian understanding of personhood. Through each section of the book he moves from more practical questions to a theological reflection on the topics more generally, and in doing so occasionally reveals a rather fixed way of imagining religious truth. Some elements of the book are, therefore, somewhat less convincing and would benefit from a more explicit description of underlying theological assumptions and a wider discussion of these in the context of bioethics. It is also not clear that he is able to totally extricate his lines of thinking from the particular context of US conservatism, but it is arguable that this simply affirms his premise that there is no such thing as a disinterested bioethicist.
However, rather than offering easy answers in this book, Meilaender focuses on the questions that he feels have not been adequately asked, let alone answered, on topics ranging from the giftedness of organ transplantation and embryo research to palliative sedation and torture. His conclusions are sometimes surprising, yet they are always grounded in his underlying appeal to personhood. In the final few chapters of the book, he develops this theme more widely, and in doing so describes an authentically Christian way of walking the via media between the common and individual good.
Meilaender’s book is a useful tool not only for those who are engaged in the professional practice of bioethics, but also for the individual Christian thinker, who he persuasively argues cannot exempt themselves from thinking about these issues – and indeed getting involved in a public conversation on them. While his conclusions may not be to everybody’s taste, the challenges he lays down and the emphasis on personhood provide rich ground for theological reflection, not least in a society in which bioethics is often seen in purely utilitarian or even allegedly scientific terms.