For many, dementia disrupts basic ideas about what it means to be human, raising profound philosophical and theological questions on the nature of personhood. In this article I ask might reveal personhood in a “secular age.” suggest that ill-fitting relationship between Western bioethics, with its emphasis autonomy, throws into relief boundaries secular self, tease out ethical implicatio...

OBJECTIVE After the introduction of assisted reproductive techniques, human embryos were officially introduced into laboratories and now thousands of them are cryopreserved in such settings. Embryonic stem cells and the future application of such cells in the treatment of disease opened the door to further research on human embryos. These developments raise many ethical issues, some of which ha...

In the first case, naturalism has led to a devaluation of human beings, who no longer have inherent dignity and worth, and there is no ultimate purpose for man.i Since we are all just the random result of evolution, there is no basis for law or morality, and death is the end of personal existence. In the second case, postmodernism has promoted the idea that meaning and purpose are illusory goal...

Sesha would never live a normal life. . . . The worst fear was that her handicap involved her intellectual faculties. . . . Yet . . . it never even occurred to me to . . . think of her in any other terms than my own beloved child. She was my daughter. I was her mother. That was fundamental. . . . We didn’t yet realize how much she would teach us, but we already knew that we had learned somethin...

Abortion is the issue that first brought evangelical Christians and other cultural conservatives into the arena of bioethics. Although today bioethics is dominated by other issues that are perceived as more pressing, the answer to the philosophical question lurking behind abortion--Who and what are we?--turns out to be the key that unlocks the ethical quandaries posed by these other issues. Aft...

Recent psychology research has established that people do not employ a simple unidimensional scale for attributions of personhood, increasing from non-sentient rocks to mentally complex humans. Rather, there are two personhood dimensions: agency (e.g. planning, deciding, acting) and patiency feeling, desiring, experiencing). Here we show this subtle distinction also occurs in the semantic space...

My solution to the problem of Dion and Theon (Burke 1994a) employs the doctrine of sortal essentialism.1 Jim Stone (2002) objects to my solution and proposes to weaken the doctrine so as to block my employment of it. Others question a different element of my solution: the maximality of personhood and thinkerhood. After opposing Stone's weakening of sortal essentialism, and responding in a preli...