Interrupting moral technique, transforming biomedical ethics: reading Karl Barth against the ‘sin’ of the common morality and for the postures of human flourishing

The evolution of modern biomedical science and practice has forced many to grapple with difficult ethical questions. The advent of such novel questions has demanded that moral discourse in medicine adapts and changes to solve the problems introduced in our brave new world. What was once the charge of the physician is now a public discourse involving a number of relevant constituents and decision-makers. Accordingly, leaders in the discipline of bioethics have sought to articulate a particular grammar that might help to guide and direct the on-going discourse while providing the systems necessary for making morally efficient decisions. Thus, the lingua franca of bioethics has pushed steadily towards philosophically neutral terms and the accompanying generalities of the common morality. In this way, the grammar of bioethics has functioned much like a moral technique. It has not enabled us to speak well with and for persons embedded, rather embodied, in community gathered about the peculiarities of biomedical crises. Against such moral techne, the aim of this research has been to explore an ethics that might interrupt and transform the contemporary and abstract modes of moral discourse determined as universal, while challenging one to take seriously the concrete tasks and processes of real human life. It has been my aim to reimagine the common morality theologically, such that we may learn to be an authentic means of hope, to help resolve problems, to assist in the free response to dilemmas raised by the science and practice of biomedicine, and to provoke human decision towards human flourishing. Thus, the purpose of this research has been to explain Barth’s moral theology as that which not only grounds human being as ontologically relational but also to argue that such correlation is what might stir human responsibility to, with, and for our near and distant neighbours. Accordingly, for Barth, what is common is the provisional, public, and interpersonal character of moral conversation, discernment, and decision.