How Brave A New World?
Ozar, David T.
A guide for the perplexed HOW BRAVE A MEW WORLD? Richard A. McCormick, S.J. Doubleday, $15.95, 440 pp. David T. Ozar IT IS NOT UNCOMMON that, when an author has acquired a certain degree of...
...Commonweal welcomes letters on subjects treated in its pages...
...Thirdly, when McCormick develops an approach for responding to a set of questions, he does not rest pat with it...
...But this book also deserves the attention, perhaps even more, of those persons who are concerned about these issues, perhaps even quite anxious about them, and who would like to do some careful thinking about them but who judge themselves in need of a guide, preferably a clear writer who is thoroughly versed in the issues, preferably a reflective and insightful thinker, and perhaps for some, preferably also a fellow Christian...
...But few such volumes offer much more than a convenience for scholars and a tribute to the author...
...Thus, though these reports and examinations of other thinkers are sometimes repetitious as the reader proceeds from section to section of the book, still they always shed light on the questions at hand and enrich the effort to answer them...
...It is against this reflective background that he wrestles with questions, examines alternative approaches, and proposes his own cautious, carefully defended responses...
...For readers who expect such narrowness, however, a word on the book's "Catholic connection" may be helpful...
...Rather than presenting his previous articles in chronological order, as is often done in such collections, McCormick has gathered tham together according to topic: (I) General Methodological Reflections...
...That he is a Jesuit and a theologian does not mean that his treatment of issues like abortion and contraception is either narrow or biased...
...and love as the crowning human relationship...
...How Brave A New World...
...Within each of these divisions the articles are organized in such a way that the reader can follow the development of McCormick's own understanding of the issues involved...
...Thus, for example, the insights developed in connection with the issue of proxy consent for experimentation involving children are then applied to issues regarding the morality of research on fetuses, to the benefit of our understanding of both issues...
...He is not marking time here or simply scoring academic points...
...The second and more important reason is that McCormick is an excellent scholar to learn along with...
...His thoughtful reflections on genetics and genetic planning shed valuable light on such reproductive interventions as artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization, and so on in many other parts of the book...
...Instead he begins patiently mastering the questions...
...their presuppositions, their historical roots, the concepts on which they depend, the range of possible answers to which they seem to point...
...David T. Ozar IT IS NOT UNCOMMON that, when an author has acquired a certain degree of prominence, a publisher will gather up articles that have appeared in a variety of different journals and collections, and publish them in a single volume...
...and McCormick is a master at it...
...Secondly McCormick never simply issues his own judgment on a question without carefully considering the alternative approaches developed by other thinkers...
...Richard McCormick's How Brave a New World...
...Moreover, the Catholic Christian tradition has held "at least since the time of Aquinas that revelation and the faith experience originate no new concrete moral demands that are in principle unavailable to human insight and reasoning...
...the social character of the human person...
...The underlying ground of reflections on bioethics, McCormick holds, is what he labels "essential ethics, those concrete demands thought to be valid of and to apply to all persons precisely as human persons...
...It is amazing and illuminating how much can be learned in really mastering a set of questions...
...First, he never just starts out in the middle of things, presuming that everything that goes before the questions at hand is already understood...
...III) Abortion, Morality, and Public Policy...
...deserves the attention of all those who teach, preach, or counsel on the issues of bioethics...
...The effect is almost always to deepen our understanding of his insight and our grasp of the underlying connections between the sets of questions involved...
...Richard McCormick invites a wide audience...
...is an excellent book...
...What faith, revelation, and the tradition of Judaeo-Christian reflection do is facilitate our grasp of the truly human, "steadying our gaze on the basic human values," which are often obscured in a particular culture's ways of articulating, mediating, or even simply ignoring them...
...For McCormick, these basic truths of the human can be grouped in most general terms under three heads: the dignity of the individual person...
...nor is the process slow-moving...
...The reason for this is twofold, having to do first with the plan of the book, the way in which the themes in it are presented, and secondly having to do with the development of McCormick's own reflections, the way he approaches a set of questions and wrestles with them and responds to them...
...But, for McCormick, it is precisely in comprehending and comparing diverse judgments and diverse ways of reasoning in support of them that we make progress towards truth...
...At every turn, as article follows article, our understanding of the underlying issues, of the links between the various sets of questions, and of the fundamental values and principles of human action that are at stake in these issues grows deeper...
...is different...
...II) Experimentation and the Incompetent...
...Similarly McCormick's reflections on the Catholic church's teaching on contraception shed light on the moral issues connected with sterilization...
...VII) The Quality of Life...
...V) Reproduction Technological Genetics...
...Letters of not more than 250 or 300 words naturally have a better chance of being published...
...Rather he takes it to parallel and related sets of questions to see how it fares there...
...For such pesons, in truth for anyone interested in a serious examination of these central issues of bioethics, How Brave A New World...
...IV) Contraceptive Interventions...
...Thus the format makes reading McCormick's book carefully and thoughtfully an education in the issues it covers...
...If there is anything which borders on being excessive in this book, in fact, it is the extent to which the judgments and supporting arguments of Paul Ramsey, Joseph Fletcher, and many other serious thinkers on these issues are doggedly explained, examined, and debated...
...The effect is that of learning along with him...
...VI) The Preservation of Life...
Vol. 109 • March 1982 • No. 5
