Benjamin Parviz

This essay argues that legalized assisted suicide is a temptation to despair that pushes those most vulnerable into despair, creating desire for the kind of death that such laws sanction. Laws that permit assisted suicide are messages that communicate to those whose conditions satisfy eligibility criteria that their society does not need them. This essay examines the impact of such a message on those who are vulnerable to despair. According to Gabriel Marcel, relationships of love are the means by which one endures through challenges and transcends to fullness of life without falling into despair. Relying on Marcel’s account of hope and despair, I argue that those whose social situation involves few or no such relationships of love are vulnerable to despair, and that the message of legalized assisted suicide is a force pushing such vulnerable people into despair.

Ours is a society of people who need to feel themselves alive. It is a society in need of mystery. Increasingly, citizens struggle to find a reason to live, preferring non-existence and capitulating to desires for self-destruction and death. A complete analysis of the social and cultural causes of this epidemic of despair is necessary, but it would be complex and would need to have a wider gaze than mere economic and material causes. A society that is attuned strictly to problems and not at all to mystery is ill-equipped to understand despair, or to find hope through participation in being. Acceptance of techniques of degradation such as the legal adoption and implementation of assisted suicide will exacerbate the problem of despair by teaching citizens unavailability that will deny them the possibility of hope. The more that techniques of degradation proliferate across a society, the more that the society’s citizens are deprived of their ability to be open to mystery, to participate in being, to feel themselves as alive. They will be unable to get out of bed in the morning because there will be nothing to pull them out of bed in the morning. Feeling as though they are already dead, societies with assisted dying programs have a solution for that problem.

Is Christian hope compatible with transhumanist hope? Can Christians be transhumanists? This essay examines these questions from the perspective of Thomas Aquinas’s descriptions of hope in Summa Theologiae. Section I presents a summary of transhumanism as it is represented by the transhumanist organization Humanity+. Section II summarizes Thomas Aquinas’s concept of hope in the Summa Theologiae and presents a Thomistic account of Christian hope for what humanity will become. Section III draws from Aquinas’s account of hope to construct an account of transhumanist hope. Section IV considers the possibility that Christian hope may be limitedly compatible with transhumanist hope. Section V shows that Christians cannot hope for what transhumanists hope because for what transhumanists hope cannot be considered good for humanity

Michael Lamb’s recent book A Commonwealth of Hope presents an opportunity for bioethicists to engage in critical self-evaluation in order to consider anew why and how to engage difficult bioethical problems and questions with those who maintain diverse moral and metaphysical perspectives. Drawing on an account of the virtue of hope from Augustine of Hippo, Lamb develops a political theory in which hope provides common ground for political cooperation between diverse citizens of a commonwealth. The purpose of this introduction is to sketch out a framework by which to assess and evaluate whether bioethics demonstrates hope. This article provides a summary description of Lamb’s presentation of Augustine’s virtue of hope and his concept of politics. Then it considers implications of Lamb’s politics of hope for bioethics, identifying three features of hopeful bioethics, with which bioethicists can engage in self-reflection and evaluation.