Defining the beginning and end of life

Names such as Quinlan, Cruzan, Kevorkian, and Schiavo have had broad media exposure and have become a part of American Culture. The bioethical and legal issues that surround them, and the questions those issues raise about the beginning and end of human life, are not likely to be resolved in the foreseeable future. The latest issue of The Journal of Law, Medicine, & Ethics examines these questions and the bonds that join them in its symposium, Defining the Beginning and The End of Human Life: Implication for Ethics, Policy, and Law.

Within its pages, anthropologist Lynn Morgan presents beliefs from various cultures, looking specifically at the idea of "personhood" in different societies. "The practices of personhood are not impersonal or abstract or objective or simply deliberative. They are specific and situated, and they shape us, even as we shape them," she concludes.

In the first of two point-counterpoint discussions, Donald Marquis discusses his widely debated secular argument against abortion while Bonnie Steinbock provides a broad view of the moral status of human embryos, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of several approaches. In the second of the two discussions, James L. Bernat speaks of brain death as the determination of death: a concept and public policy that, Bernat asserts, is both intuitive and well accepted by many societies. James McMahan counters by distinguishing between biological death and when a person ceases to exist.

David DeGrazia addresses President Bush's and the President's Council on Bioethics' stand against cloning by arguing that the pre-conscious fetus lacks the psychological unity that might bind it to its future self. It thus lacks substantial moral status and does not have a right to remain alive.

In the last article of the symposium, George Khushf argues the need to add questions of human value and purpose to public discourse so we may better understand our disagreements. "Because the deep questions of human value and purpose are regarded as 'private' questions in our society, we end up with a truncated, shallow public discourse that never addresses what we are really talking about," Khushf claims.