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The Bodily Incorporation of Mechanical Devices: Ethical and Religious Issues (Part 2)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2007

COURTNEY S. CAMPBELL
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon
LAUREN A. CLARK
Affiliation:
Department of Religion, Denison University, Granville, Ohio
DAVID LOY
Affiliation:
Xavier University, Cincinnati, Ohio
JAMES F. KEENAN
Affiliation:
Theology Department, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, and Weston Jesuit School of Theology, Cambridge, Massachusetts
KATHLEEN MATTHEWS
Affiliation:
Weiss School of Natural Sciences, Rice University, Houston, Texas
TERRY WINOGRAD
Affiliation:
Stanford University, Stanford, California
LAURIE ZOLOTH
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois

Extract

Mechanical devices implanted in the body present implications for broad themes in religious thought and experience, including the nature and destiny of the human person, the significance of a person's embodied experience, including the experiences of pain and suffering, the person's relationship to ultimate reality, the divine or the sacred, and the vocation of medicine. Community-constituting convictions and narratives inform the method and content of reasoning about such conceptual questions as whether a moral line should be drawn between therapeutic or enhancement interventions and/or between somatic and neural/cognitive interventions. By attending to these broader community-forming concepts, it is possible to identify three general orienting themes in religious perspectives on incorporated mechanical devices, which we shall designate as perspectives of “appropriation,” “ambivalence,” and “resistance.”

Type
SPECIAL SECTION: TECHNOLOGY AND THE BODY: LINKING LIFE AND TECHNOLOGY
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

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