Engaging the Contours of Medicine’s Ethos and Human Rights: By the Power to Choose or the Person Who Chooses?
Matthew Vest, PhD, The Ohio State University; Jeffrey Bishop, MD, PhD, Saint Louis University; and Ryan Nash, MD, MA, FACP, FAAHPM, The Ohio State University College of Medicine
Within our modern, democratic society, much attention is given to core principles such as freedom, equality, and social justice, and the notion of human rights is often seen as a point of access for realizing these principles. Human rights grant protection and even belonging within a democracy, enabling one who has a right to stand alongside others also bearing rights that help define human relationships, articulate basic expectations, and enable a mutual grounding. Be it the Code of Hammurabi (1780 BC), Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics (330 BC), the Magna Carta (1215), or John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, the concept of human rights has a vast history, and this continues today with unmistakable implications for defining the contours of medicine.
The aims of contemporary medicine to promote and care for bodily health and wellbeing may seem to some a self-evident good, and yet when inevitable ethical puzzles and questions arise regarding the limits of medicine, most turn for guidance yet again to principles, especially the “four principles” of autonomy, justice, non–maleficence, and beneficence. In effect, a sort of parallel can be discerned between the guidance sought in human rights—seeking liberty, equality, the pursuit of happiness—and in medical ethics, or medicine’s ethos—seeking autonomous freedom, justice, and well-intentioned care. In both cases, a similar trajectory or methodology may be discerned whereby we seek after transcendental goods ensconced in the language of principles. Human rights offer protection towards civic and social flourishing; medical ethics enables physical and embodied health.
All well and good, yet this panel session proposes to ask a simple question: is this enough? Are human rights complete enough as a political and philosophical framework to ensure life, liberty, and happiness? Are the principles of medical ethics sufficient to enable personal health and bodily freedom? In other words, on both fronts this panel session does not wish to contest the possible or hopeful goods that may arise from seeking human rights (amidst and for a flourishing polis) and medical ethics (amidst the doctor-patient relationship). Rather, this hope acknowledged, the deeper question asks if we have sufficiently examined the history, the context, and the purpose of the human rights and medical ethics framework? If these questions are not weighed with care, if we accept uncritically these modern frameworks, we risk accepting at the gates a bristling Trojan horse.
How so? It is fine and well to speak of human rights via Locke, Kant, or even the US Bill of Rights (1791), yet we should not miss Stalin’s Constitution of Human Rights signed in 1936 that explicitly reveals the Soviet legacy of human rights. Human rights according to the legacy of Lenin and Stalin? Indeed.
Further, while noting the validity of autonomy, beneficence, or the like, autonomy is most at stake in medicine when speaking of religious objections to elective abortion or physician assisted suicide? How shall these principles guide the political and scientific disputes over defining gender-affirming healthcare based on medical standards or directly contrary to medical standards (Amicus Brief of California and 20 Other States, No. 21-2875)?
In short, this panel session seeks to probe the concept of right in parallel to the modern ethos of medicine to seek their possibilities and limits, their ambitions and dangers. To ground these questions, we will take up the Orthodox Christian theologian Christos Yannaras’ The Inhumanity of Right as a particular point of departure. Yannaras notes the possibilities of good within the concept of right, yet he calls for a more critical view of human rights than typically accorded, drawing our eyes away from the immanent limits of human rights to seek first the supporting, transcendent spirit within and behind material and political spheres. Yannaras hence speaks of problems in medicine and bioethics as examples of the “boundaries of existential experiences” where the great temptation is to reduce our spiritual vision of persons to see mere individual power of choice. In this maneuver, evidenced every time medicine appropriates unquestionably “autonomy” and “individual rights,” we move from the far greater—theological anthropology of imago Dei persons—to the lesser—a logic of rights and raw, decontextualized possibilities. The implications of elevating raw power over theological personhood are particularly dangerous in that it is not entirely wrong; spiritual persons are free beings with powers, yet the inversion of this spiritual hierarchy redefines our understanding of nature. Here medicine especially suffers for as with the logic of rights, the logic of naturalism has no contours. Rather that receive medical arts as sub–created gifts within ordered, relational communities, we are left with the formless chaos of unguided liberalism. Persons are replaced with power, and the conscience of medicine meaninglessly follows power. With power in place of persons, can medicine ever shun evil to embrace the Good?
This panel presentation brings together three scholars with expertise in medicine, philosophy, and theology working on a larger project on Yannaras to explore the possibilities and limits of human rights from an Orthodox Christian perspective.
The aims of contemporary medicine to promote and care for bodily health and wellbeing may seem to some a self-evident good, and yet when inevitable ethical puzzles and questions arise regarding the limits of medicine, most turn for guidance yet again to principles, especially the “four principles” of autonomy, justice, non–maleficence, and beneficence. In effect, a sort of parallel can be discerned between the guidance sought in human rights—seeking liberty, equality, the pursuit of happiness—and in medical ethics, or medicine’s ethos—seeking autonomous freedom, justice, and well-intentioned care. In both cases, a similar trajectory or methodology may be discerned whereby we seek after transcendental goods ensconced in the language of principles. Human rights offer protection towards civic and social flourishing; medical ethics enables physical and embodied health.
All well and good, yet this panel session proposes to ask a simple question: is this enough? Are human rights complete enough as a political and philosophical framework to ensure life, liberty, and happiness? Are the principles of medical ethics sufficient to enable personal health and bodily freedom? In other words, on both fronts this panel session does not wish to contest the possible or hopeful goods that may arise from seeking human rights (amidst and for a flourishing polis) and medical ethics (amidst the doctor-patient relationship). Rather, this hope acknowledged, the deeper question asks if we have sufficiently examined the history, the context, and the purpose of the human rights and medical ethics framework? If these questions are not weighed with care, if we accept uncritically these modern frameworks, we risk accepting at the gates a bristling Trojan horse.
How so? It is fine and well to speak of human rights via Locke, Kant, or even the US Bill of Rights (1791), yet we should not miss Stalin’s Constitution of Human Rights signed in 1936 that explicitly reveals the Soviet legacy of human rights. Human rights according to the legacy of Lenin and Stalin? Indeed.
Further, while noting the validity of autonomy, beneficence, or the like, autonomy is most at stake in medicine when speaking of religious objections to elective abortion or physician assisted suicide? How shall these principles guide the political and scientific disputes over defining gender-affirming healthcare based on medical standards or directly contrary to medical standards (Amicus Brief of California and 20 Other States, No. 21-2875)?
In short, this panel session seeks to probe the concept of right in parallel to the modern ethos of medicine to seek their possibilities and limits, their ambitions and dangers. To ground these questions, we will take up the Orthodox Christian theologian Christos Yannaras’ The Inhumanity of Right as a particular point of departure. Yannaras notes the possibilities of good within the concept of right, yet he calls for a more critical view of human rights than typically accorded, drawing our eyes away from the immanent limits of human rights to seek first the supporting, transcendent spirit within and behind material and political spheres. Yannaras hence speaks of problems in medicine and bioethics as examples of the “boundaries of existential experiences” where the great temptation is to reduce our spiritual vision of persons to see mere individual power of choice. In this maneuver, evidenced every time medicine appropriates unquestionably “autonomy” and “individual rights,” we move from the far greater—theological anthropology of imago Dei persons—to the lesser—a logic of rights and raw, decontextualized possibilities. The implications of elevating raw power over theological personhood are particularly dangerous in that it is not entirely wrong; spiritual persons are free beings with powers, yet the inversion of this spiritual hierarchy redefines our understanding of nature. Here medicine especially suffers for as with the logic of rights, the logic of naturalism has no contours. Rather that receive medical arts as sub–created gifts within ordered, relational communities, we are left with the formless chaos of unguided liberalism. Persons are replaced with power, and the conscience of medicine meaninglessly follows power. With power in place of persons, can medicine ever shun evil to embrace the Good?
This panel presentation brings together three scholars with expertise in medicine, philosophy, and theology working on a larger project on Yannaras to explore the possibilities and limits of human rights from an Orthodox Christian perspective.