Abstract
If you are going to write a book, it seems like the last way you would want to begin is by highlighting its subject’s growing reputation for being boring. Yet, this is precisely how Matthew Vest begins his exploration of contemporary bioethics. He asks: emerging out of the rapid cultural, economic, and technological changes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, how could the field of bioethics have gotten, of all things, dull? Thankfully for the reader, Vest does not see this as inevitable and his own work both demonstrates and calls us to the much more exciting possibilities latent in bioethics.
As the title indicates, Vest does not think the issues plaguing bioethics are unique to the field. Unmoored from pre-modern sources of authority and practices of knowledge, ethics as a whole is adrift in modernity. Moral philosophy now pursues its work via abstract theorizing and a form of principlism that distances theory from praxis. For Vest, though, this pseudoneutrality only obscures how things actually work. He draws on John Milbank’s, among others, critique of liberalism to show how contemporary bioethics has been reduced to just biopolitics. Evacuated of any foundational metaphysical commitments, a “neutral” bioethics has become fundamentally dependent for its ethical content on the unspoken but coercive power of whatever the reigning political regime. Instead of substantive methods of moral reasoning, “what emerges is a professionalized, easily accessed language capable of employment within various shades of liberal secularism” (p. 44).
To illuminate not just how but why bioethics has gone this way, Vest enlists the mid-twentieth century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s critique of the modern philosophical project—which Vest calls Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy—does not resolve various Big Questions or propose a new theory but rather questions the aims, methods, and expectations underlying the whole venture. He develops this primarily through an examination of how language works, its possibilities and especially its limits. Despite some crucial concepts (most notably “language games”) being left underdeveloped or confused as a result, Vest successfully guides the reader through Wittgenstein’s thinking without getting bogged down in long-standing interpretive debates. With Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy on the table, then, Vest demonstrates how bioethics is vulnerable to its critique. This is where Vest’s work shines, showing the reader how the abstract, scientific theorizing endemic to modern moral philosophy cashes out in the work of contemporary bioethics.
Wittgenstein’s key insight for Vest’s argument is that once we acknowledge that philosophical language cannot operate transcendently to ground ethics, the solution is not to bin transcendence but to recognize its ordinary role in human life and grounding for ethics. Wittgenstein’s “religious way of thinking,” though, remains ambiguous. To keep thinking in this direction with more religious specificity, Vest turns to another enigmatic voice, the Texan, Orthodox Christian bioethicist H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr. He deploys Engelhardt and Wittgenstein as grumpy, kindred spirits who “both simultaneously [employ] a critique of secularism while nevertheless engag[e] in the available possibilities of the secular” (p. 158). Vest is careful to qualify that this similarity exists primarily on the level of methodology and spirit rather than purpose. But in this, both point beyond the limited possibilities of contemporary bioethics toward “sacred and transcendent realities beyond scientific thinking and materialism”—toward, in Vest’s word, wonder (p. 175).
This turn to wonder, teased as Vest’s answer to the boredom of contemporary bioethics throughout the book, gets a full articulation in Vest’s final and only constructive chapter, “How Sacred Cosmology Saves Ethics.” As ambitious as the title suggests, this self-described essay in moral theology builds a vision of bioethics centered on the cosmological significance and meaning of human bodies. Instead of abstract principles, it is the everyday practices of human life in community with their spiritual meaning and religious symbolism that animate any work we could call ethics. Vest articulates this in a particularly Orthodox Christian tune, but not in a way that renders variations on the theme impossible. When, as he hopes, we come to understand this work as reintegrating bodily matter with its spiritual meaning, then “ethics becomes nothing less than the way of theosis, the destiny of mankind” (p. 222). What could be less boring?
To readers versed in the arguments of postliberalism, Vest’s critique of modern ethics and many of the voices that make an appearance (e.g. Christopher Lasch, Stanley Hauerwas, John Milbank) will not be surprising. In its least interesting moments, Ethics Lost in Modernity is a familiar polemic of decline and the lamentable “ruins of postmodernity” (p. xxvii). But at its best, which is much more often than not, Vest’s work is a crucial and targeted intervention in the very real problems in contemporary bioethics. In particular, his attention to language and the practices of our common life are a unique contribution, helpful for both getting clear on where bioethics has gone wrong and where new paths might be developed.
