Plan for Summer

I recently visited the Health Care Ethics dept at SLU and I am now very excited to start in the fall. But before that, I have some work to do. This summer I will be studying medical terminology. This makes perfect sense; all the literature I will be reading makes use of the legion of medical terms, procedures, and diagrams so I might as well know them too.

While medical terminology will take up a big portion of my summer, I have a few more interesting books lined up. I just started After Virtue by MacIntyre, which, I admit, is completely overdue. This is a book I should have read years ago--but I am just getting to it now. Next, I will be reading a few bioethics books: Aquinas and Bioethics by Craig Payne and Principles of Biomedical Ethics by Beauchamp and Childress. The Principles book is practically the Bible of bioethics, so I imagine I will be getting many miles out of it.

Aside from this, I also need to start thinking about the course I will be teaching in the fall. I will have one section of Intro to Clinical Ethics this fall, and two sections starting in the spring. This course has a basic syllabus for uniformity, but I do get to add some additional readings/assignments to make it my own. I have been reading some really interesting articles by David Oderberg that I might incorporate. He has a great one on the metaphysical status of the embryo, which is the fundamental question that must be addressed before we can talk about ethics.

One of the most interesting/frustrating things I have noticed in applied ethics (environmental specifically), is that no one wants to talk about metaphysics. They assume we can know what "intrinsic value" and "moral worth" is without first understanding the thing itself. See, metaphysics is simply the investigation of things themselves, so virtually all other methods and sciences presuppose certain metaphysical commitments. I just want to make sure to incorporate those commitments into my discussion of bioethics.

In our everyday experiences, we all take certain things for granted. For instance, we take it for granted that the objects of our sense experience are actually real. However, this assumption entails certain metaphysical commitments, namely, realism. Another commitment most people utilize is that similar objects share at least some properties. While this may seem commonplace, there is a contingent of people, the nominalists, who do not think we can analyze objects in this way.

My point is that it makes more sense to start out with the metaphysical commitments and their implications in the realm of ethics. For Aristotelians and Thomists, this is clearly seen in discussions of the teleological nature of, say, sexual organs and processes.

Anyways, more on this to come.

Chris