As a bioethicist and Catholic deacon-in-training, Dr. Michael Deem has spent years in the medical trenches as well as in theological and philosophical research. Michael Deem joins Grant in this episode to answer questions such as, “Do bioethicists actually change minds?” “Does healthcare flourish under a provider-of-services model?” and “Are bioethical principles self-evident?” Their discussion covers territory from contraception to logic to the style of recent Catholic popes.
1:27 - “Thousands of medical ethicists and bioethicists, as they're called professionally, guide the unthinkable on its passage through the debatable on the way to becoming the justifiable until it is finally established as unexceptionable.” - Richard John Neuhaus, “The Return of Eugenics,” 1988
The Loma Linda case manifested that the voice of the clinical ethicists was, for some reason, absent.
6:54 - Bioethics research faces two problems. Firstly, it can experience a conflict of interest without protection when developed under the institutions they serve. Secondly, creating a truly expert accreditation is elusive because the field is so interdisciplinary.
11:38 - Bioethics must be based not just on logical validity but also the truth of the value terms in its premises.
14:54 - “…The dominant views of autonomy in bioethics today have that picture of the criterionless choice…. I think the reluctance to consider [questions of human freedom] has led us to this very empty, vacuous notion of autonomy of, just, choice.”
17:34 - New Natural Law theorists reaffirm that certain propositions are self-evident and do not require theological commitment.
22:10 - Positing shocking future hypotheticals avoids the question of whether an action is good or evil.
30:51 - In contrast to an Eastern approach to medicine which focuses on wellbeing, the provider of services model of medicine cuts out conversation between the patient and physician.
40:47 - When prescribing hormonal birth control, there may be a lack of conversation around its risks and alternatives, an ignorance of fertility awareness-based methods or a hostility toward fertility awareness-based methods.
49:34 - Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis most basically differ in the style of their encyclicals. While Pope John Paul II directed his later letters to an audience of academics, Pope Francis is more pastoral in his orientation.
54:40 - Pope St. John Paul II was, in other ways, a pastoral pope who put a basic trust in his Curia. Pope Francis, like Pope Benedict XVI, has focused on necessary institutional reforms of the Church.