Love and the Dignity of Human Life

Author: Robert Spaemann
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 080286693X
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 80

Book Description
What does it mean to love someone? What does the concept of human dignity mean, and what are its consequences? What marks the end of a person's life? Is personhood more than consciousness? These perplexing questions lurk beneath the surface of everyday life, surfacing only to demand urgent attention in crises. Renowned German philosopher Robert Spaemann addresses these and other foundational enigmas in three eloquent short essays. Speaking wisdom to controversy, he offers carefully considered, novel approaches to key philosophical and theological questions about the nature of human love ("The Paradoxes of Love"), dignity ("Human Dignity and Human Nature"), and death ("Is Brain Death the Death of a Human Person?").

Losing Our Dignity

Author: Charles C. Camosy
Publisher: New City Press
ISBN: 1565484711
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
There is perhaps no more important value than fundamental human equality. And yet, despite large percentages of people affirming the value, the resources available to explain and defend the basis for such equality are few and far between. In his newest book Charles Camosy provides a thoughtful defense of human dignity. Telling personal stories like those of Jahi McMath, Terri Schiavo, and Alfie Evans, Camosy, a noted bioethicist and theologian, uses an engaging style to show how the influence of secularized medicine is undermining fundamental human equality in the broader culture. And in a disturbing final chapter, Camosy sounds the alarm about the next population to fall if we stay on our current trajectory: dozens of millions of human beings with dementia. Heeding this alarm, Camosy argues, means doing two things. First, making urgent and genuine attempts to dialogue with a secularized culture which cannot see how it is undermining one of its most foundational values. Second, religious communities which hold the Imago Dei sacred must mobilize their existing institutions (and create new ones) to care for a new set of human beings our throwaway culture may deem non-persons.

From Human Dignity to Natural Law

Author: Richard Berquist
Publisher: Catholic University of America Press
ISBN: 0813232422
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Book Description
From Human Dignity to Natural Law shows how the whole of the natural law, as understood in the Aristotelian Thomistic tradition, is contained implicitly in human dignity. Human dignity means existing for one’s own good (the common good as well as one’s individual good), and not as a mere means to an alien good. But what is the true human good? This question is answered with a careful analysis of Aristotle’s definition of happiness. The natural law can then be understood as the precepts that guide us in achieving happiness. To show that human dignity is a reality in the nature of things and not a mere human invention, it is necessary to show that human beings exist by nature for the achievement of the properly human good in which happiness is found. This implies finality in nature. Since contemporary natural science does not recognize final causality, the book explains why living things, as least, must exist for a purpose and why the scientific method, as currently understood, is not able to deal with this question. These reflections will also enable us to respond to a common criticism of natural law theory: that it attempts to derive statements of what ought to be from statements about what is. After defining the natural law and relating it to human or positive law, Richard Berquist considers Aquinas’s formulation of the first principle of the natural law. It then discusses the love commandments to love God above all things and to love one’s neighbor as oneself as the first precepts of the natural law. Subsequent chapters are devoted to clarifying and defending natural law precepts concerned with the life issues, with sexual morality and marriage, and with fundamental natural rights. From Human Dignity to Natural Law concludes with a discussion of alternatives to the natural law.

Dignity

Author: Remy Debes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190677546
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 437

Book Description
In everything from philosophical ethics to legal argument to public activism, it has become commonplace to appeal to the idea of human dignity. In such contexts, the concept of dignity typically signifies something like the fundamental moral status belonging to all humans. Remarkably, however, it is only in the last century that this meaning of the term has become standardized. Before this, dignity was instead a concept associated with social status. Unfortunately, this transformation remains something of a mystery in existing scholarship. Exactly when and why did "dignity" change its meaning? And before this change, was it truly the case that we lacked a conception of human worth akin to the one that "dignity" now represents? In this volume, leading scholars across a range of disciplines attempt to answer such questions by clarifying the presently murky history of "dignity," from classical Greek thought through the Middle Ages and Enlightenment to the present day.

Love and Responsibility

Author: Pope John Paul II
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 9780898704457
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
Pope John Paul II's discussion of family life and sexual morality, first published in 1960, which defends Catholic tradition and draws upon physiological and psychological research regarding the sexual urge, love, chastity, and sexology and ethics.

Humanity Without Dignity

Author: Andrea Sangiovanni
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674049217
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
Indivisibility and Hierarchy among Human Rights -- Notes -- References -- Index

Modern Fascism

Author: Gene Edward Veith (Jr.)
Publisher: Concordia Publishing House
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Book Description
With fascist ideology making a comeback today, the author proposes conservative Christian responses as the best antidote for overcoming them.

The Gospel of Life

Author: Pope John Paul II
Publisher: Random House Incorporated
ISBN: 9780679758648
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description

Dignity As a Human Right?

Author: George P. Smith
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781498584210
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Book Description
This book examines the place of human dignity as a normative standard, principle, or right in domestic and global health care decision-making. The contentious issue of end-of-life care serves the foundation of the analysis of human dignity as a human right.

The Hope and Despair of Human Bioenhancement

Author: Paschal M. Corby
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532653948
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 341

Book Description
The Hope and Despair of Human Bioenhancement is a virtual dialogue between Transhumanists of the “Oxford School” and the thought of Joseph Ratzinger. Set in the key of hope and despair, it considers whether or not the transhumanist interpretation of human limitations is correct, and whether their confidence in the methods of human enhancement, especially through biotechnology, corresponds to genuine hope. To this end, it investigates the philosophical foundations of transhumanism in modernity’s rejection of metaphysics, the triumph of positivism, and the universalism of the theory of evolution, which when applied to anthropology becomes the materialist reduction of the human person. Ratzinger calls into question this absolutization of positive reason and its limitation of hope to what human beings can produce, naming it a pathology of reason, a mutilation of human dignity, and a façade of a world without hope. In its place, he offers a richer concept of hope that acknowledges our contingence and limitations.