Bioethics promises to be to the twenty-first century what physics was to the twentieth - a source of fear and moral confusion. It could be argued that we escaped the twentieth century without a nuclear holocaust so our current concerns are nothing more than paranoia. However, it could also be argued that we barely escaped the twentieth century intact.
What's worse, we are living in a culture that has rejected the very moral principles that are meant to guide us through difficult moral decisions like those presented by bioethics. It seems the lessons we learned about human dignity from slavery, civil rights and the woman's suffrage movement have been lost. Moral principles are written off as personal beliefs that are not to be shared. Human dignity is destroyed by the belief that human personhood can be arbitrarily defined. The very foundations of truth have been undermined by the belief that if objective truth exists at all human beings can never be sure they know it. If these cultural attitudes had their strangle hold on most of the twentieth century instead of just the last decades, the world would be a nuclear wasteland. What will be their affect on the twenty-first century in the face of bioethical dilemmas?
In face of such danger, it is imperative for Catholics to learn the moral principles and the moral reasoning necessary to apply the principles to specific dilemmas. However, Catholics are often tempted to counter the errors of our times with errors of their own. In the face of moral relativism, Catholics sometimes lean toward moral legalism.
