Religion and Bioethics: A Chapter in Their Shared History
by William R. LaFleur
Sometimes, fortunately, we make unplanned discoveries even in the course of making a mistake. At least that was my experience more than twenty years ago during days spent at a conference on Japanese studies at the University of Venice. Venice, of course, is among the world's most fascinating cities. On the morning of the second day of the conference I exited my hotel and intended to go by canal taxi to the site of the conference at the university. I boarded what I took to be the correct boat and anticipated a ten-minute ride to my destination. However, to my utter surprise, after a while the boat I was on headed out into the open waters of the lagoon. I realized that I had been foolishly overconfident about being able to read signs in Italian and had boarded the wrong boat. Mine was not going anywhere near the university; instead it was bound for the Isola di San Michele, Venice's cemetery island.
It was then that I noticed that all of my companions on the boat were older or middle-aged women dressed in black and carrying bouquets. When we arrived at the island, these women visited the graves of deceased relatives and I resigned myself to biding my time watching them and waiting for when we might return. At first I was disgruntled for having made a foolish mistake and for having to miss part of the conference. But then I suddenly realized that what I was witnessing, on what is popularly called Venice's "Island of the Dead," was a practice I had often seen in Japan but never in America. These Italian ladies dressed in black and offering flowers at the grave sites were, in fact, doing their own version of haka-mairi (lit., "visit to a grave").
Realizing this, I felt much more relaxed and ready to appreciate what I might observe there. Eventually we returned to the city and I was able to link up with colleagues at the conference. However, what I had seen that morning was something of a revelation to me, and I have given it more thought since then. Primarily it struck me as good and admirable that even in "the West" it was possible to find individuals or groups who were willing to take the time and effort to visit graves and remember the deceased. What I had so often seen and participated in earlier in Japan, namely haka-mairi, still survived in some places in the West.
And thinking about this stimulated my own recollection of an event that took place during my very early youth--something I had not thought about for many decades. It probably occurred when I was eleven years old, because my father's mother was still alive, and she died when I was twelve. In fact, my grandmother played an important role in what transpired--namely an animated family discussion in which the adults took part. Its topic was, in sum, whether or not our practice of grave visitation would be continued. That is, our family was deciding the future of our own version of haka-mairi.
Family History
Visiting graves in America, although it did not include some of the Buddhist and Confucian components that are part of haka-mairi in Japan, appears to have been fairly common until sometime after World War II. During the second half of the twentieth century, however, most American families let this practice disappear from their lives--although a small minority kept it. Most families appear to have let this practice slip away without much discussion.
My family, however, differed on this score. An open discussion of the pros and cons took place. It was the most animated family "debate" I ever witnessed when young. My paternal grandfather and grandmother each represented one side in it. It had long been grandmother's practice to visit the graves of her deceased parents and siblings at least twice a year--certainly on that national holiday in May we now call Memorial Day, but at that time bore the name of Decoration Day. The older name itself tells a tale; back then people didn't just accept the holiday as a day off from work, one designed for picnics and ball games, but, rather, they often went to family cemeteries and literally decorated with bouquets the graves of soldiers and deceased relatives. My grandmother never missed doing that every year on that special day in May, and others of us went along. She also, I was told, would make a journey to the cemetery on the birthdays of her parents and dead sisters. She took a lunch along and would sit for hours by the graves thinking about her past days and years with the people she loved and wished to remember. I think we could say that in her own way my grandmother was fond of the practice of haka-mairi.
Although I believe their relationship was a very good one, on this particular matter my grandfather and grandmother had very different points of view. And in the family discussion, I overheard their diverging perspectives. Grandmother's was articulated as an irrepressible love for her family, including its deceased members. That love had not been extinguished by their deaths. Love was all-important in what she said about this matter. She quoted the New Testament about faith, hope, and love--and that love is the greatest of these three. She stuck tenaciously to this theme and would not be moved away from it.
My grandfather made his case for abandoning the practice of cemetery visits. I should mention that he relished debating. (Within a few years of that time, when a teenager, I would discover how much he took pleasure in turning me into his own debate partner, forcing me to defend my own point of view. And for this gift from him I remain grateful today.)
His manner was gentle, but he had specific criticisms of our family's practice of grave-site visits. I recount them here only because I think they tell a story about a certain chapter in the history of the religious consciousness and practices of modern Americans. One of his criticisms came from his interpretation of a passage in the New Testament--namely, the Gospel according to Matthew 8:22, where it is reported that Jesus said to a man: "Follow me, and leave the dead to bury the dead." I myself am not at all clear about the meaning of this section of text. However, I am very sure of what my grandfather thought it implied. He understood it as indicating that Christians--that is, followers of Jesus--have far more important things to do than preoccupy themselves with funerals and memorializing the deceased.
To him the matter was clear-cut and simple. The soul of any deceased believer had gone to be with God; the corpse, a merely material residue after that separation had taken place, had no religious or spiritual significance. Cemeteries hold no more than decomposing bodies, things without value.
I wish to make it clear that I write of this rather personal matter without suggesting in any way that I lack respect for my grandfather. I mention it here simply to illustrate rather concretely a change that was then taking place in the religious sensibility of some, probably many, Americans. My grandfather was an articulate Protestant layman, but he was also someone in whom, I now recognize, was a belief in a very sharp split between body and soul/mind, as had been outlined in the seventeenth century by Rene Descartes. Historians today see Descartes as having had a deep and lasting impact--not only on religion and philosophy, but also on medical practices and what we today call bioethics. The phrase that today pinpoints this way of separating the soul/ mind so radically from the body is "Cartesian dualism."
There was another argument that I recall my grandfather using. It was that, since there is nothing of real value in the cemetery, to go there even for a brief bit of time would benefit no one. In fact, it would be merely a waste of time. To him, then, it seemed that my grandmother's practice of packing a lunch, being driven out to the site, and spending hours sentimentally going over the past in her own mind while she was there was, to put it bluntly, wasteful. The past, after all, has passed. Nothing can be done to change it. But the present and the future lie still before us--awaiting our good deeds for our fellow humans, persons alive, in the flesh, and able to benefit from those deeds. The dead cannot benefit.
Reusing Bodies
Today I think about this argument about avoiding waste, especially as it has been used to challenge the propriety and value of taking part in rituals or ceremonies. Although my grandfather was probably unaware of it, the long arm of English utilitarianism was, I suspect, beginning to have an impact within America at that point when my family began to wonder if going to the cemetery might not be, in fact, a waste of time. Some utilitarians had been very eager to eliminate what they saw as foolish waste in the things we do.
This theme was especially pronounced in the writings and personal actions of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), an influential English jurist and philosopher. Bentham, it is important to recall, was in favor of things that many of us today will applaud--including the abolition of slavery, rights for women, and the separation of church and state. Bentham was also one of the first thinkers to articulate the ethics of utilitarianism. The phrase often used to sum up its core principle is "the greatest good for the greatest number," and one of its central ideas is that, in order to produce the maximum amount of good in the world or society, we need to calculate the effect of a decision or action. Merely having good intentions is not enough--especially if the result does not benefit as many persons as possible. Bentham, therefore, insisted that we use our minds to calculate what will be the likely effect of something we are about to do. As in business, so, too, in ethics. Eliminating waste is crucial. This eagerness to avoid anything wasteful is, I think, an important part of the message he wanted to convey to his own and later generations.
It is, I suggest, helpful to realize that Bentham also embraced the dualistic view of a strict separation of body and soul/mind--although he was not interested in the more spiritual side of human existence. He honed in on the question of the body, especially the body of a person who had died. Bentham may have been the first philosopher in modern times to suggest that the corpse should not be wasted. He assumed that once the mental or spiritual part of a human being is no longer detectably present, what remained--that is, the inert corpse--is something that no longer has value to the deceased or to persons close to him or her.
But does that mean it has no value whatsoever? Not according to Bentham, who lived at a time when medical institutions in England were eager to get access to cadavers for use in research and the education of physicians. Historians have shown that precisely at that time the corpses of the poor in London were often stolen because teaching hospitals were willing to buy usable ones. Bentham, commendably, saw the social injustice in this. He went on to assume and recommend that all corpses should be made useful in such ways. Cadavers should not be wasted. Richardson and Hurwitz, authorities on this period of history, comment as follows:
Lacking religious belief, Bentham viewed the human carcass as matter created by death. As an eighteenth century rationalist, he found little difficulty in addressing the problem of how this matter might best be disposed of with a view to maximising the "Felicity of Mankind." Death was a waste of resources.(1)
Bentham acted on his own recommendation--but with a twist. His last will and testament indicated that his own corpse should be dissected for the education of young doctors. But he also wanted it reconstituted afterward, embalmed, and put on ongoing public display. It was to be called an "auto-icon," and after his death it was, in fact, treated as he had wanted and still exists today.
Bentham seems to have been obsessed with corpses and what he regarded as society's bad habit of wasting them. He envisioned a society in which the body of anyone might be recycled and put on public display as an objet d'art. Whole groups of such auto-icons might, he conjectured, be put in public parks and in this way replace the need for sculpture and the somewhat unnecessary, ultimately wasteful labor of sculptors. Richardson and Hurwitz detect something deeply problematic in this:
Bentham's quirky vision of the uses of human taxidermy included the erection of temples of fame and infamy in which auto-icons would take the place of carved statuary or waxwork: "so now may every man be his own statue."(2)
If, that is, a thoroughgoing dedication to avoiding waste would eliminate religious ritual, it might also find a practical substitute for the works of artists.
Medical Applications
Fortunately for all of us, utilitarianism never received public sanction and application to push ahead quite that far. Later utilitarians such as Mill and Sedgwick quietly dropped Bentham's more bizarre recommendations. However, the idea of avoiding the waste of corpses remained in place. When combined with radical dualism, a growing impatience with religious ritual, and society's belief that medical needs trump all others, it would eventually have a wide impact within the English-speaking world. It would surface most strongly, I suggest, when what professional experts call "cadaveric organ transplantation"--that is, transplants from persons deemed brain-dead--became technically possible near the end of the 1960s.
Perhaps my grandfather, not long before that, did not realize how deeply the values of utilitarianism had subtly influenced his own thinking about religion, ritual, and what he saw as wasteful in making visits to the graves of the deceased. I do not for a moment doubt his sincerity and his own conviction that his position was in accord with biblical teachings. Because he himself died before Dr. Christiaan Barnard performed the world's first heart transplant, what my grandfather would have thought about transplants, a new and radical form of biotechnology, is something I was never able to learn.
It is worth noting, however, that an American who poured great energy into promoting the acceptance of transplants from brain-dead persons was a theologian and one who explicitly held that the time had come for Americans to absorb into their religion the values of utilitarianism. Joseph Fletcher (1905-91) in 1966 published a widely influential book, Situation Ethics, in which he insisted that "as the love ethic searches seriously for a social policy it must form a coalition with utilitarianism. It takes over from Bentham and Mill the strategic principle of 'the greatest good of the greatest number.'"(3)
It is not surprising then that within little more than a year and, importantly, just after Dr. Barnard had transplanted a heart in South Africa (the "miracle of Cape Town"), Fletcher wrote an essay defending cadaveric transplants as a way to avoid what he called cases of "shameful waste."(4) He subsequently became an advocate of the use of every new biotechnology that came along--including, in fact, the genetic programming of unborn children for eugenic reasons. He later became a pure utilitarian and stated publicly that he no longer considered himself a Christian.(5) Today Fletcher's perspective appears to be alive and well, even if maybe no longer dominant, in American bioethics. One bioethicist acknowledged the continuity and, with a touch of humor in a book advocating human cloning, wrote as the concluding sentence: "Call me Joe Fletcher's clone."(6)
During the last half of the twentieth century, many of us were accustomed to accept and endorse every new biomedical development as "good" and a sure sign of progress in our time. But the costs were considerable. Older practices such as remembering the dead through religious ritual may have been far too easily jettisoned as wastes of time and effort. Maybe the twenty-first century will give occasions to recover something of what was in danger of being lost. I see reason for hope in the fact that even in the West we now find scientists, philosophers, and religious thinkers who question Cartesian dualism and insist on the unity of the person. Japan, I hope, will retain the positive values contained in the practice of haka-mairi. And I hope that when my own children and grandchildren spend some days in Venice, they will still find people going out to visit the graves on the Isola di San Michele.
Notes
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