Human Nature and Biotechnological Enhancement: Some Theological Considerations

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-240
Author(s):  
Gerald McKenny
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Living Things ◽  
Biological Nature

Theologies of human nature routinely reflect the insights of evolutionary biology, for which human biological nature is variable, changing and indeterminate in its boundaries with other living things. However, these theologies do not yet reflect what biotechnology discloses about human biological nature, namely, that it is malleable and indeterminate in its boundaries with machines. Does respect for human biological nature as created by God, or protection of the human person whose nature it is, require us to refrain from taking advantage of its malleability and indeterminacy to select or design functions and traits? Or should we welcome malleability and indeterminacy as conditions for us to fulfill a vocation to determine our nature or bring it to perfection? And do malleability and indeterminacy render obsolete the notion that we look to our nature to determine what our good is? This article answers these questions.

scholarly journals Dijaloški odnos bioetike i biopolitike

Diacovensia ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-456
Author(s):  
Mislav Kutleša
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Elderly People ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Value System ◽  
Independent Work

The paper seeks to establish a relationship between bioethics and biopolitics in the context of elderly people. Although aging itself is not a phenomenon, the attitude towards elderly people is highlighted as a phenomenon. Given that they often lose their psychophysical abilities and are faced with personal limitations, they inevitably face both the value system and the treatment of society. In this sense, biopolitics is manifested as the force and power whose instruments allow it to transform and shape a new culture, however, not by independent work, but relying on the help of bioethics, whose main concern is the attitude towards human dignity, life and health. Contrary to the culture of materialism and consumerism, bioethics has the task to reawaken in the modern society the meaning and value of human nature as the basis of ethics and healthy biopolitics in order to raise awareness of virtues as part of the nature of the human person. This aims to highlight the ethics of virtues as a new paradigm of biopolitics because it corresponds to that original and primordial human.

scholarly journals Ecstatic Hymns: The Hymn’s Role in Encountering Mystery in Liturgical Worship

Lumen et Vita ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Heeder
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Transformative Experience ◽  
Hans Urs Von Balthasar

The Mass’s music enables us to encounter God by being drawn out of ourselves by beauty. Thus, hymns form us ecstatically by engaging the intellectual, physical, and spiritual elements of our human nature to better know and love God as Mystery and Beauty Engaging the whole human person, singing enables us to offer God all of ourselves and so encounter God as Mystery. Drawing on the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar writes, this paper will reflect on how the beauty of song invites us into the Mystery of Beauty: God. Singing a hymn of praise is a transformative experience of beauty, which draws us out of ourselves, placing us in a posture in which we can encounter and be formed by God, and so more fully be able to encounter God, others, and ourselves.

The Perfectionist Turn

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas J. Den Uyl ◽  
Douglas B. Rasmussen
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Living Things ◽  
Good For

This chapter argues against the claim advanced by Daniel Haybron, Daniel C. Russell, and Mark LeBar that human self-perfection is ultimately based on notions of well-being and human flourishing that we bring to our understanding of human nature and in favor of the idea that it is human nature itself that ultimately grounds our understanding of human well-being or human flourishing. In doing so, the question of whether there is some gap between (a) what it is to be a good human being and (b) what is good for a human being is addressed. It is shown that the arguments on behalf of a such a gap fail and that the version of perfectionism that is advanced—that is, individualistic perfectionism—is ideally suited to not only avoid such a gap but also to display their unity, especially when perfection is understood as a process of living things and not as some cosmic or metaphysical process.

The Liberal Gene: Sociobiology as Emancipatory Discourse in the Late Soviet Union

Slavic Review ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 356-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yvonne Howell
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Broad Spectrum ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Evolutionary Genetics ◽  
Evolutionary Ethics ◽  
Intellectual Freedom ◽  
The West ◽  
Soviet Culture ◽  
Individual Self

Sociobiology investigates all manifestations of human nature—including our moral, aesthetic, and intellectual strivings—from the perspective of evolutionary biology. In this article, Yvonne Howell examines V. P. Efroimson's controversial 1971 Novyi mir article, “The Genealogy of Altruism: Ethics from the Perspective of Human Evolutionary Genetics,” in order to point out one of the paradoxes embedded in late Soviet culture: namely, the potentially reductive and reactionary discourse of sociobiology was used instead to make a compelling argument for social pluralism, intellectual freedom, and individual moral responsibility. Howell compares the initial rejection of sociobiology by liberals in the west with the valorization of Efroimson's evolutionary ethics among a broad spectrum of the liberal, educated public in late USSR. She shows how Efroimson updated the “evolutionary humanism” championed by Soviet geneticists in the 1920s to challenge enduring Brezhnev-era dogma about the malleability of human nature. This account indicates a trajectory from earlier tensions between disciplining scripts for selfhood typical of Soviet modernism and alternative narratives (both humanistic and biological) for an ethics based on autonomous individual self-scripting.

A Wojtyłian Reading of Performativity and the Self in Judith Butler

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Franks
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Divine Power ◽  
John Paul Ii ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Power Of God

Abstract Drawing on Hegel, Judith Butler argues that the subject is the product of its desire for subject-ion. The subject, its gender, and even the sexed body itself come into being through reiterating or parodying preexisting norms and discourses of power (“performativity”). Butler rejects the realities of substance and a fixed human nature that would limit the possibilities of performativity. I summarize and assess Butler’s proposals, highlighting both the value and the drawbacks of her theory. I then show how John Paul II’s understanding of meaning and of the body as tasks takes up what is positive in Butler. He escapes the pitfalls of her thought, however, by retaining both metaphysics and revelation. He argues that the subject exists as substance or suppositum, which defends it against the encroachment of power. He also insists on the importance of human nature, which makes the human person to be the kind of substance who can form herself through the God-given task of creative action directed toward meaningful self-gift. Lastly, John Paul II emphasizes that the divine power of God enables the person to transcend the power dynamics of the culture of death.

Impatience and Humanity's Sinful State in Tertullian of Carthage

2008 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Person ◽  
The Cross

AbstractTertullian's unique use of 'patience' as a salvific paradigm, grounds a conception of human nature, and particularly sin and 'fallen nature', articulated in economic terms. This article takes this conception, together with Tertullian's bipartite anthropology, to disclose a unique understanding of humanity's sinful condition. As the two composite 'parts' of man art interrelated in an economy of relation to God, so we will argue Tertullian grounds his concept of soteriology in his vision of the human person, linking it intrinsically to the life of Christ and the offering of the cross, uniting the human to the trinitarian life of Father, Son and Spirit.

Human Nature and Aristotelian Virtue Ethics

2012 ◽  
Vol 70 ◽  
pp. 169-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosalind Hursthouse
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Naturalism ◽  
Ethical Thought

Given that it relies on claims about human nature, has Aristotelian virtue ethics (henceforth AVE) been undermined by evolutionary biology? There are at least four objections which are offered in support of the claim that this is so, and I argue that they all fail. The first two (Part 1) maintain that contemporary AVE relies on a concept of human nature which evolutionary biology has undercut and I show this is not so. In Part 2, I try to make it clear that Foot's Aristotelian ethical naturalism, often construed as purporting to provide virtue ethics with a foundation, is not foundationalist and is not attempting to derive ethics from biology. In Part 3, I consider the other two objections. These do not make a misguided assumption about Aristotelian ethical naturalism's foundational aspirations, nor question AVE's use of the concept of human nature, but maintain that some of AVE's empirical assumptions about human nature may well be false, given the facts of our evolution. With respect to these, I argue that, as attempts to undermine AVE specifically, they fail, though they raise significant challenges to our ethical thought quite generally.

scholarly journals Hope and Tragedy: insights from religion in the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 135
Author(s):  
Amy Daughton
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Paul Ricoeur ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Paul Ricœur ◽  
Religious Thinking

The trajectory of Paul Ricoeur’s thought from the fallible to the capable human person offers a hopeful vision of human nature constitutive of our shared political life. Yet, by necessity, hope arises in response to the tragic, which also features in Ricoeur’s work at the existential and ethical levels. At the same time hope and tragedy represent concepts at the limit of philosophical reasoning, introducing meeting points with religious discourse. Exploring those meeting points reveals the contribution of religious thinking to the understanding of hope and tragedy and establishes Ricoeur’s political thinking as ultimately shaped by their interplay.

scholarly journals La distinción entre persona y naturaleza humana según Nédoncelle. The Distinction Between Person and Human Nature According to Nédoncelle

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Fernando Sellés
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Person ◽  
The Self ◽  
Actual Situation ◽  
Ideal Self ◽  
Multiple Reality ◽  
The Ideal

Este trabajo versa sobre la antropología de M. Nédoncelle. En él se sostiene que el pensador francés defiende que el hombre no es simple, sino que se da en él una distinción real entre la persona y la naturaleza humana. La persona es una realidad múltiple en los hombres: espiritual, interior, novedosa, irrepetible, relacional... La naturaleza, que es orgánica, es una y común en los hombres. La persona se distingue de la personalidad y del yo porque no admite tipologías. La persona depende de Dios y es inmortal; la naturaleza, de los padres y es mortal. Se añade que ‘el yo ideal’, la vocación, es superior a la persona que se es.This work focuses on the Nédoncelle´s anthropology. It sustains that the French thinker defends that man is not simple, but rather presents in itself a real distinction between the person and human nature. The person is a multiple reality in men: spiritual, interior, new, unique, relational... Nature, which is organic, is common in men. The person is also distinguished from personality and the self, because it cannot be classified in types. The person depends on God and is immortal; the human nature comes from the parents and is mortal. He adds that the ‘ideal self’, the vocation, is superior to the human person in his actual situation.

Biological evolution

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Briggs ◽  
Hans Halvorson ◽  
Andrew Steane
Keyword(s):  
Design Education ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Evolutionary History ◽  
Biological Evolution ◽  
Sequence Of Events ◽  
Living Things ◽  
History Of ◽  
Informed Opinion ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
Insight Into

The chapter discusses the history of life on Earth, and the lessons to be learned from the neo-Darwinian synthesis of evolutionary biology. The long and complex sequence of events in the evolutionary history of life on Earth requires considered interpretation. The neo-Darwinian synthesis is well-supported by evidence and gives rich insight into this process, but does not itself furnish a complete explanation or understanding of living things. This is because a process of exploration can only explore; it cannot fully dictate and can only partially constrain what type of thing will be found. What is found is constrained by other considerations, such as what is possible, and what can make sense. A brief critique of some of Richard Dawkins’ work is given, and also of the movement known as ‘Intelligent Design’. Education policy is well served by a fair appraisal of informed opinion in this area.

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