Arthur J. Dyck

Referent-Models of Loving: A Philosophical and Theological analysis of Love in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice

Love as a moral norm has a very prominent place within the discussions of contemporary Christian ethics. There are three definite trends especially evident in the most popular of these discussions of love. In the first instance, there is a tendency to make love serve as the sole norm in ethics. There is a second tendency to equate love with beneficence. This means, among other things, that love tends to be put into a utilitarian type of calculus and that specific norms such as the Ten Commandments are either played down or dropped entirely. Both of these views of love, by themselves or held in concert, collapse the traditional distinction between love and justice. There is yet a third ten-1 dency to drop any distinction between love for God and love for/the neighbor. Love for God is simply to be understood as love for the neighbor and, as such, it is not something to pursue or cultivate for its own sake. That all three of these tendencies are significantly related to one another should become evident from our further discussion of them.

Alternative Views of Moral Priorities in Population Policy

There is a particularly urgent need to analyze population policy debates because of the serious nature of the disagreements that exist and the serious consequences either of choosing the wrong policies or of choosing none. The significant sources of agreement and disagreement about population policy are described and include a description of 3 major groups whose population policy recommendations vie for acceptance: crisis environmentalists family planners and developmental distributivists. These 3 groups represent distinct policy orientations and priorities. The crisis environmentalists take the view that rapid population growth has already produced a serious crisis for the human species and the planet earth. They all agree that resources needed for the survival of the human species are finite and will be depleted unless population is held at a level that establishes a favorable balance between numbers of people and available resources. Family planners like crisis environmentalists also speak of overpopulation at times but their focus more often is upon unwanted fertility or rapid population growth. They favor complete voluntarism in the form of government investment in free-standing birth control clinics to offer all the available methods of birth control to those who would not otherwise be able to afford them. This is in contrast to the crisis environmentalists who recommend coercive government policies. The developmental distributivists believe that certain kinds of improvements in socioeconomic conditions lead to lower birthrates as observed in the demographic transition experienced in Western countries. This group regards unfavorable socioeconomic conditions as major causes of large families and rapid population growth. They argue that the key to lowering fertility lies in the extensiveness of the distribution of benefits.

Taking Responsibility for Our Common Morality

Scholars in all fields should hold themselves morally responsible for what they publish and teach. One would think that everyone would take this for granted, but Hilary Putnam, for one, has earnestly warned that we dare not. As he writes, “To-day, as we face the twenty-first century, our task is not to repeat the mistakes of the twentieth century.” He sounded this warning at the conclusion of his analysis of Jacques Derridas philosophical works. Putnam regrets that philosophers reside among the all too numerous scholars whose publications and instruction aided and abetted the development of the “political tragedy” exemplified by the regimes of Hitler and Stalin. Derrida the philosopher counts among current scholars whose thinking raises the specter of repeating those mistakes of the twentieth century and their horrendous aftermath. Taking the renewal of philosophy as the theme for his Gifford Lectures of 1990, Putnam characterized the writings of Derrida as not only philosophically unsound, but also as dangerous and irresponsible.

Social Justice is the Only Ethical Population Policy

Science does not have a distinguished record when it comes to assessing population growth. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, there were scholarly treatises depicting child-bearing and child-rearing as burdens, some expressing the fear that people would soon have so few children that the very survival of the human species was at stake. 1 I was reading these scary books, telling me that children are on the wane at the very time that the post-World War II baby boom was beginning, and death rates in many parts of the world were coming down, fueling population growth. But soon some academics spawned a whole new literature and a new fear. The new fear you can guess from the titles of some books published in the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as The Population Bomb; Famine 1975; and World Population Crisis: The United States Response. 2 Once again, academics led the way in yet another of historys ironies: When in 1965 I became a member of a newly formed, heavily endowed, Center for Population Studies at Harvard University, a great deal of money, energy, and scholarship was being generated at the very time when the rate of population growth in the world was beginning to decline.3 Indeed, according to a recent United Nations medium projection, the worlds population will stabilize (that is, attain replacement level fertility rates [about 2.1 children per woman] shortly after 2200.4 The crisis orientation to population growth died down from about the late 1970s until more recently. I see some signs of its revival presently. But the push for controlling popUlation growth and government sponsored family planning programs for the purpose of bringing down birth rates has never seriously waned. Academics with this orientation are represented in significant numbers in the American Public Health Association and the Population Association of America; they are also found in foundations, planned parenthood organizations, and the United Nations, particularly its Population Division. How should we

Teaching Compassion: Professional Education for Humane Care

It is one of the ideals in medicine to be known as a compassionate physician. Yet medical students often complain that they enter the study of medicine with a strong desire to be kind to others, and during their medical education find themselves losing this ideal. Apparently the rewards of medical education are gained largely by becoming a technically competent person, and not in becoming a kind person.