Michael Dahnke

This chapter discusses the concept and ethical challenges of “personhood” as seen in the film _Lorenzo's Oil_ (1992). The film tells the based-on-truth story of Augusto (Nick Nolte) and Michaela (Susan Sarandon) Odone's efforts to find for a cure for their young son's (Lorenzo) rare disease, adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), a genetic disorder causing neurological debilitation and, eventually, death. The parents' discover a simple dietary therapy based on the oil of the rapeseed plant, Lorenzo's Oil, which came to be a therapy for boys with ALD around the world. The chapter reflects on the question of whether Lorenzo, who had debilitated to a state of immobility and unresponsiveness, is still a person. It argues that it remains unclear whether Lorenzo was always a person temporarily trapped in an unresponsive body or if in some way he lost and regained his personhood upon his partial recovery. The conceptual and practical difficulties and challenges of personhood dramatized in the film also provide physicians with a greater understanding of such cases and acknowledgment of the need for compassion both for such patients and their families.

Most modern ethicists and ethics textbooks assert that religion holds little or no place in ethics, including fields of professional ethics like medical ethics. This assertion, of course, implicitly refers to ethical reasoning, but there is much more to the ethical life and the practice of ethics—especially professional ethics—than reasoning. It is no surprise that teachers of practical ethics, myself included, often focus on reasoning to the exclusion of other aspects of the ethical life. Especially for those with a philosophical background, reasoning is the most patent and pedagogically controllable aspect of the ethical life—and the most easily testable. And whereas there may be powerful reasons for the limitation of religion in this aspect of ethics, there are other aspects of the ethical life in which recognition of religious belief may arguably be more relevant and possibly even necessary. I divide the ethical life into three areas—personal morality, interpersonal morality, and rational morality—each of which I explore in terms of its relationship to religion, normatively characterized by the qualities of devotion, diversity, and reasoning, respectively.

The controversial case of Terri Schiavo came to a close on March 31, 2005, with her death following the removal of a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy tube. This event followed years of controversy and social upheaval. Voices from across the entire political and cultural spectrums filled the airwaves and op-ed pages of major newspapers. Protests ensued outside of Ms. Schiavo’s care facility. Ms. Schiavo’s parents published videos of their daughter on the internet in an effort to prove that she was not in a vegetative state and could potentially recover. There is a certain mystery to the entire controversy given the fact that, legally, it was largely a matter of settled law. Precedent cases and legal statutes clearly set out the proper procedures and decisions to be followed in this case. Nonetheless, powerful challenges and virulent opposition to these standards arose. Through an investigation of this case as well as a comparative study of the case of Dax Cowart (in particular, the documentary depictions of Dax Cowart’s case) and of a photograph by Joel-Peter Witkin, I plan to investigate the source of these social upheavals and hypothesize that they were largely the result of a phenomenological reaction to the human face.