Catholic Bioethics for a New Millennium by Anthony Fisher

Abstract

500 BOOK REVIEWS Catholic Bioethics for a New Millennium. By ANTHONY FISHER. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. 346. $30.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-521-25324-6. Anthony Fisher’s first book brings together a collection of previously published essays and conference presentations on a variety of hotly debated topics in Catholic medical ethics. It was probably no easy task for Fisher to decide what to include, since he has published extensively on bioethics over the last twenty-five years. While Fisher begins the book with three chapters on methodological questions (culture, conscience, and cooperation), the heart of the book consists of six chapters on controversial issues that preoccupied much of bioethics, especially Catholic medical ethics, at the turn of the millennium. Chapters 4-6 focus on aspects of the abortion debate (e.g., “when human life begins,” embryo experimentation, and pre-natal testing), and chapters 7-9 take up questions “at the other end of life” (8) (e.g., transplantation, medically assisted nutrition and hydration, and euthanasia). The final two chapters employ the case-study method to examine two types of Catholic participation in the public square, namely, how Catholic healthcare facilities and Catholic politicians may serve the authentic common good of contemporary Western societies. Fisher argues his views vigorously and at times polemically, not unexpectedly for a work in bioethics with a strong constructive approach on a variety of neuralgic issues. He is most nuanced and generous on the issues (e.g., in the chapters on transplantation and Catholic political participation) where the disputed viewpoints within the Catholic tradition tend to be less rancorous, or where he takes a more exegetical and pastoral approach (as in the chapter on euthanasia). However, most noteworthy about the book is not its arguments about the controversial issues. For the most part Fisher does not aspire to novel takes on the issues, but stakes out in an intelligent, sophisticated, and at times pithy way—ground well-trodden by the kinds of Catholic bioethicists typically associated with Catholic Church-sponsored bioethics centers (e.g., Anscombe/Linacre Bioethics Centre, Pontifical Academy for Life). What makes this book noteworthy—and very difficult to review—is that it seeks to be “all things to all people.” Anthony Fisher plays many roles: he is a Dominican, a lawyer, a philosopher, a bishop, and a pastor. The book is an amalgam of genres: at times he argues as a philosopher, at other times he writes as a bishop offering guidance to his flock, at times he speaks as a casuist, at times as a public intellectual proffering pithy slogans, at times as a biblical exegete, at times as a lawyer, and at times as a pastor. And at times he integrates many of those roles in a masterful way. However, if the reader does not appreciate that different chapters of the book have rather different audiences and approach issues in diverse way, the book may well seem somewhat disjointed. The unity of the book does not lie in a particular genre or mode of argumentation. BOOK REVIEWS 501 What unites Catholic Bioethics for a New Millennium is Fisher’s reference to himself as one of the “John Paul II generation” (1). This is no mere pious reference. Every chapter in the book seems to draw as extensively as possible on the thought of Pope St. John Paul II. The index has at least five times as many references to the works of John Paul as any other thinker. The encyclical Evangelium vitae (The Gospel of Life) receives far more citations than any other document, and Fisher dubs it John Paul’s “bioethical charter” (4). Back in 1995 when Evangelium vitae first appeared, Fisher appraised it as “undoubtedly the most authoritative statement of Christian bioethics to date” (“Theological Aspects of Euthanasia,” in Euthanasia Examined: Ethical, Clinical and Legal Perspectives, ed. John Keown [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995], 330 n. 22). In addition, Fisher displays the influence of John Paul in his strong integration of issues of sexuality and the family (and John Paul’s Theology of the Body) with biomedical issues. Even the title of the book is an allusion to a work of John Paul, namely his...