Abstract
This article investigates how Edith Stein’s philosophical work on conscience is relevant for appreciating conscience today. In particular, this article shows how Stein’s contributions to conscience explicates what it is and why it is relevant for moral decision making. Moral decision making is necessary in bioethics and healthcare. However, leading bioethicists today lack an understanding of what conscience is, how it applies to healthcare practice and why it should be respected. Recent developments in obligatory referrals for healthcare professionals reveal further challenges related to appreciating conscience in current bioethical contexts. In this article, I consider the importance of Stein’s work on conscience to address the gap in knowledge related to conscience in bioethics today. To do so, I will outline the main aspects of Stein’s phenomenological and metaphysical approaches to the psycho-spiritual-physical aspects of being human. I will then describe her work on conscience. Next, I will discuss how contemplation vis à vis the Catholic imagination could provide a way to perceive how conscience is a response to morality. Finally, I will show how Stein’s work can refute contemporary approaches to conscience and obligatory referral.
Highlights
Stenian Philosophy in Relation toThis article examines conscience in light of Edith Stein’s philosophy in relation to the problem of contemporary bioethical approaches to conscience
Understood as the interior activity of a human person in response to the interpersonal call to the moral life in response of the finite to eternal being, conscience is an essential part of being a human person
Re-appreciating the whole person and their interior life is critical to re-appreciating conscience, since it is an essential aspect of the soul’s activity and involvement in the interior life requisite for discerning and enacting morality
Summary
This article examines conscience in light of Edith Stein’s philosophy in relation to the problem of contemporary bioethical approaches to conscience. To begin to re-appreciate conscience in bioethics for healthcare contexts, this article will first summarize the dominant contemporary bioethical approaches to conscience and, by focusing on the example of obligatory referral, show how they lack a cohesive understanding of conscience. It will present a genealogy of conscience from a metaphysical perspective. This article argues that Stein’s articulation of conscience can advance an appreciation of conscience in current bioethical and healthcare contexts—namely, by utilizing phenomenology as a method to access the interior life of the human person, in which the conscience resides and works. The Catholic imagination is useful for highlighting the relevance for perceiving morality and how we ought to respond to it, which is the work of conscience
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