The Bioethics of Elfland: Imagining a Chestertonian Bioethics 
Dominic Robin, Saint Louis University, Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics, St. Louis, MO

At first glance, G.K. Chesterton and modern biomedicine have little in common. Indeed, at first glance, Chesterton and health have little in common, a fact that is evidenced by the fact that Chesterton, morbidly obese most of his life, died of congestive heart failure at age 61. However divergent the two may be, however, I am curious about how a Chestertonian philosophical approach can help inform and reimagine what medicine can and (perhaps more importantly) cannot do. Chesterton was, after all, one of the few people in the early twentieth century who both foresaw the horrors eugenics would engender and actively worked against the propagation of the philosophy. In this paper, I imagine a “Chestertonian” bioethics, pulling specifically from Chapter 4 of Orthodoxy, “The Ethics of Elfland.”  A Chestertonian bioethics prizes mystery and paradox, both of which are effectively foreclosed by instrumental, pragmatic, or principlist approaches to bioethics. Additionally, Chesterton’s appeal to magic and enchantment highlight the limits of strict utilitarian logic, demonstrating the ways that the very idea of “utility” presupposes a stable, non-metaphysical reality by which things can be objectively assessed. In this way, a Chestertonian approach to bioethics dethrones instrumental logic as de facto ruling force within bioethical discourse, reopening, in the process, conversations about faith and spirituality.