Ethics Lost in Modernity: Reflections on Wittgenstein and Bioethics
Ebook
Ethics Lost in Modernity: Reflections on Wittgenstein and Bioethics turns to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein as a guide to understand the immense success--yet great danger--of bioethics. Matthew Vest traces the story of bioethics since its inception in the late 1960s as a way to uncover a number of hidden assumptions within modern ethics that relies upon scientific theorizing as the fundamental way of thinking. Autonomy and utilitarianism, in particular, are two nearly unquestioned goals of scientific theorizing that are easily accessible, but at what cost? Vest argues that such an ethics enacts a thin moral calculation that runs the risk of enslaving ethics to scientism. Far from the depth of religious ethos and practices of virtue, modern ethics is lost amidst thin ethical theories, enacting a language game that instrumentalizes ethics in service of technological, bureaucratic, and professional end goals. He proposes that true moral living is far from anti-science, but rather is envisioned best when ethics and science are balanced with keen insights from ancient sacred cosmology.
“Drawing on Wittgenstein, Matthew Vest provides an account of the development of bioethics that is at once critical and constructive. You have the sense that this is a book someone needed to write, and Vest has now done it. Hopefully more bioethics will follow his example.”
—Stanley Hauerwas, Duke Divinity School, emeritus
“Matthew Vest successfully shows that unless we recover more metaphysical and spiritual perspectives upon cosmology, we will soon lose our ethical bearing altogether, in the face of our ever-greater ability to alter the natural world.”
—John Milbank, University of Nottingham
“The emperor has no clothes observes Matthew Vest: contemporary bioethics has evidently lost the ability to say anything new, or even anything very interesting. The crucial question is why the discourse of medical ethics has become so vacuous. Vest’s Wittgenstenian critique of mainstream medical ethicists and their methodological assumptions issues in a rousing and timely call to a more metaphysically and existentially rich discussion of the limits and dilemmas of modern health care.”
—Brian Brock, University of Aberdeen
“Provocative and comprehensive, Ethics Lost in Modernity illuminates the way to change bioethics from being boring and abstract to a challenging field addressing concrete moral persons of matter and spirit. Liberated from principlism and scientific ethics, Vest brings together Wittgenstein and Orthodox Christianity, thus linking philosophy and theology in an exceptional way, describing an ethics which becomes a meeting place of heavens and the earth. A significant book, opening new horizons and deserving careful consideration.”
—Ioannis Bekos, Theological School of the Church of Cyprus
- Title: Ethics Lost in Modernity: Reflections on Wittgenstein and Bioethics
- Authors: Matthew Vest, Jeffrey P. Bishop
- Publisher: Cascade Books
- Print Publication Date: 2023
- Logos Release Date: 2023
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781666747201, 9781666747195, 166674719X, 9781666747188, 1666747181, 1666747203
- Resource ID: LLS:9781666747201
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2023-07-25T22:07:41Z
Matthew S. Vest is Assistant Professor of bioethics at the Ohio State University and Assistant Professor of Christian ethics at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Seminary.