The Moral Mind

Overcoming the challenges of chronic disease requires a level of strength and hope that can demonstrate how remarkable people can be. Carolyn Humphreys, informed by her own experience of a progressive health condition, has written an inspirational book that can help care givers and those suffering from persistent ill health.

Artificial Intelligence, often simply AI, refers to the rapidly developing technical field of computer systems or algorithms that can imitate intelligent human behavior. There are many bioethical questions raised by the increasing use of AI in the field of medicine.

Our contemporary world is in desperate need of morally and intellectually sound bioethics. We are in the midst of a “perfect storm” combining unprecedented cultural confusion about the nature and identity of the human person and a biotechnological revolution that is fast transforming what was merely science fiction in the past into realistic scientific possibilities today or in the near future.

Thanks to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), America is blessed to have an authoritative document to guide Catholic health care institutions and professionals. The Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (ERDs) is now in its sixth edition, and a new revision is underway to update this guide to what constitutes truly Catholic health care and what practices are ethically unacceptable.

There are major ethical violations associated with a new medical technique called Normothermic Regional Perfusion, developed in Spain and elsewhere in Europe, notably the United Kingdom, and now in use in the United States. This intervention keeps oxygenated blood flowing to the organs of donors, with the notable exception of the brain, in order to optimize their quality for transplantation.

Catholic bioethicists can draw on a remarkable intellectual tradition going back centuries that helps them make important distinctions in ethical reasoning. One that puzzles many people, including some medical professionals, is the widely accepted Catholic position that there are many more circumstances where it is ethically acceptable to turn off a ventilator than there are to suspend providing food and water, even if administered by artificial means. At first glance it seems that air to breathe is even more urgently needed for keeping a patient alive than water or nutrition. This is quite true, but use of a ventilator is a different kind of care than administering food and water.

Babies are an incredible blessing and gift from God. Infertility can break the hearts of a couple and lead them to highly unethical choices in their quest to have a child. The Church in Her wisdom has provided an excellent discernment guide regarding medical interventions aimed at overcoming infertility in a teaching document, Dignitas Personae.

The human embryo is the focus of many bioethical debates. In the late 19th century, science discovered that we begin life as a single cell called a zygote created by the fusing of the nuclei of the father’s sperm and the mother’s egg cell. The dark side of modern scientific development in embryology largely began with in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the 1970s when human beings began to be conceived in laboratories in large numbers. These were used in “fertility treatments” and transferred to their mother’s or even a surrogate mother’s womb for gestation. The IVF process created “spare” or abandoned human embryos available for use in experiments and killed.

It is astonishing how quickly new biomedical technologies are emerging. Some have the potential to make a massive impact on health care and even society. Elon Musk’s  company Neuralink recently received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the first human clinical trials of their brain-computer interface device. There are many ethical questions that need to be answered concerning this type of technology and ethical safeguards that must be put into place.