In the Mail

August 10, 2006

I just received a postcard from Georgetown University Press about the new book Health and Human Flourishing: Religion, Medicine, and Moral Anthropology by Carol R. Taylor and Roberto Dell’Oro (link to publisher’s page and link to Amazon). It looks like a fascinating volume, and I look forward to reading it.

What, exactly, does it mean to be human? It is an age–old question, one for which theology, philosophy, science, and medicine have all provided different answers. But though a unified response to the question can no longer be taken for granted, how we answer it frames the wide range of different norms, principles, values, and intuitions that characterize today’s bioethical discussions. If we don’t know what it means to be human, how can we judge whether biomedical sciences threaten or enhance our humanity?