ABSTRACT

A constant theme throughout this book has been the disjunction that can occur between ourselves as conscious, planning, calculating, reasoning, dreaming, speculating, imagining and emotionally complex beings, and ourselves as sensate organisms located in a physical environment and seeking survival through constant adaptation within it, finite beings who grow and die and inevitably merge once more with the organic mix from which we emerged. We can speak of this disjunction as mind versus body, spirit versus flesh, conscious being versus embodied being – even reason versus emotion, if emotion is (wrongly)1 understood purely as a physiological reaction related to survival. But as soon as we make these oppositions we must surely be aware that there is something fundamentally wrong with them. No doubt they seem neat and tidy enough, perhaps quite reassuring if we find emotion in ourselves and others somewhat disturbing and unpredictable, or if we prefer the seeming boundlessness of thought to the limitations and frustrations of being in a body. No doubt, too, the inescapable awareness of our own death and the death of those we love makes us seek things of enduring value – ‘the eternal now’, as theologian Paul Tillich (1963) put it. There are many paths to temporary transcendence of the limitations of the body, provided by religion, music, art, contemplation of nature, or the intimacy and ecstasy of personal relationships. But, despite the delights of intellectual speculation, the bracing challenges of seeking clarity of thought and of achieving fair and reasoned debate with others, despite the joy of being ‘taken out of ourselves’ through love, the creative arts or the awesome beauty of the natural world, we remain what we inevitably are – vulnerable living tissue, located in time and space. Our bodies and the bodies of our fellow humans are always with us, an inescapable concomitant of being living, conscious beings. If we ignore this aspect of human life, we will end up with an abstract, theoretical and ultimately irrelevant bioethics. In the previous chapters, I have tried to offer a perspective on some of the

bioethical debates of our time that will help us to gain a richer understanding of how the human body can retain its moral value in the biomedical sphere, rather than becoming demoted to just another material resource,

ripe for exploitation by our burgeoning medical and biotechnological industries. This may seem a somewhat ambitious project, but in fact it is quite modest. I have not tried to formulate a new kind of ethical theory, for example something like ‘Embodied Ethics’ (see Weiss 1999: Ch. 7). Indeed, I have offered no specific solutions to quite a few of the medical ethics dilemmas of our day, such as whether surgeons should cut off healthy limbs, whether anorexics should be force-fed or whether cosmetic medicine can be seen as an appropriate activity for the medical profession. Such issues must be resolved, of course, just as we have to resolve questions like whether the trade in body parts should be legalized, whether donors of tissue should share in subsequent commercial gains, whether dead bodies should be publicly displayed or whether relatives should have a veto on cadaveric transplantation. My position on some of these questions has already been implicit or explicit in the previous chapters. My aim, however, has not been to provide set and final answers to these contemporary debates. Rather, I have seen myself as an advocate for our neglected and frequently despised partner, the body, in the hope that our decisions on these specific issues will be more considered and reflective. We can defend positions either in terms of our duties to self and others or in terms of the consequences of our actions for human welfare, but in either case we need to know what value the human body carries in such calculations of moral weight. Here the problem is that we fail to see the full reality of our own bodies and the bodies of others, even though we may seem to be quite obsessed with them. It is as though we have lost contact for years with our closest friend, and in this time we hold on to some idealized image of him or her as a kind of consolation for our loss. But what we need is to be re-united, to be ‘together at last’ and rediscover the true value of the friendship. This is the metaphor that underlies my concluding comments in this book, as I consider three aspects of such a reunion: re-union with ourselves; re-union with others; and re-union with the material world we inhabit.