Medicine or Anti-medicine?

Without Ethics no Medicine

De: Josef Seifert, Josef Maria Seifert

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

In this first volume of Seifert's Bioethics (8 volumes that constitute the most comprehensive purely philosophical bioethics in existence, all scheduled to be published in 2024), with which the series Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine opens, the following themes are carefully investigated: the thee essential parts of medicine: 1. medicine as a natural science, 2. Medicine as a practical art based on empirical knowledge, and 3. As anthropological and ethical knowledge and a practice based on them. In an important sense, the third part of medicine is the most important one that distinguishes the physiciian and nurse from scientifically kowledgeable criminals; nature. and dignity of the human person, free will, life and death, as well as wrong conceptios of both such as "brain death", the nature of medicine as a science, etc.), the foundations of Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine are being elaborated.[1] Seven goods (five immanent ones entrusted to medicine to facilitate, protect, save, restore or improve), and two transcendent ones (that are not directly under the care of physicians but have to be respected in medical actions) are identified:
Immanent Goods related to different medical actions:

1. Human life that is threatened by many anti-medical actions of killing, etc., but can be assisted, saved and protected by many medical acts.
2. Consciously/rationally awakened life, whose profound value and dignity regulate and limit the use of morally permissible sedation;
3. Health, culminating in mental health, a central good that gives medical science and actions their name;
4. Pleasure and freedom of pain which is entrusted to palliative and other branches of medicine;
5. Aesthetic integrity of the body which plastic surgery, parts of dentistry, dermatology and other branches of medicine are entrusted with.

Transcendent Goods (that need to be respected in order to reach a holistic medical ethics, particularly when they apparently conflict with the immanent goods of medicine, such as e.g. in "therapeutic abortion," organ implantation from so-called “brain dead” individuals):
6. The overall highest good and happiness of the human person.
7. The absolute Good (God)
Medicine is distinguished from anti-medicine according to whether it serves these goods or disrespects and destroys them.
Chapter 2 gives a comprehensive account of human dignity as an intrinsic, absolute and sublime value that raises the person far above all plants and animals. They, too, possess a high and morally relevant value that is the basis for environmental and animal ethics. Yet they stand essentially and incomparably lower in the hierarchy of goods than the human person, whose far higher dignity shows itself when we consider knowledge, reason, logic, free will, responsability and a conscious relation to God (religion).
The ethically and legally (in the sense of both natural law and positive law) decisive morally relevant value of human dignity is brought to evidence by distinguishing four dimensions/meanings of human dignity: 1. The inalienable ontological dignity that any person, healthy or sick, good or evil, born or unborn, possesses; 2. The dignity of the awakened rationally conscious person, of which Pascal states: our whole dignity consists in thinking; 3. then the far higher moral dignity which requires the good use of intellect and will; 4. Finally, the dignity bestowed from without: by society or by God. The book shows that and why the intrinsic and sublime value of personal dignity is a crucial foundation of ethics as well as of basic human rights, in virtue of which the person ought to be loved and affirmed for her own sake: Medical action always ought to choose these freely.

[1] The Philosophical Diseases of Medicine and Their Cure. Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine. (2004-5), 2nd ed., Medicine or Anti-Medicine? Without Ethics no Medicine.