Building Bridges for the Promotion of Life, Justice, and Peace

Building Bridges for the Promotion of Life, Justice, and Peace

by Juan Masia

I was once invited to participate in a symposium about the value of life, human dignity, and the protection of human rights. The professor who had invited me was responsible for moderating the dialogue. Since he had to introduce the speakers, he reviewed our curricula, in order to say a few words about each of the participants in the round table. But he was puzzled about my curriculum. He realized that I had written books on different subjects that seemed, at first sight, to belong to very different fields. He asked me politely: "Would you tell me, please, why did you change from one subject to another in your academic life? I see that you wrote about the hermeneutical philosophy of Paul Ricoeur in 1979 and about bioethics in 1983. Then you moved into the field of social justice when you wrote about the theology of liberation and ethics in 1985. Recently I hear that you have been involved in translating the Lotus Sutra and The Awakening of Faith. I am sorry, but that makes it difficult to decide which label to put under your name."

Then I responded: "Thank you very much for your frankness. If I were to answer ironically, I would repeat the famous slogan of the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), who used to say: 'Please, do not pigeonhole me.' I used a quotation from Unamuno because the editing of a Japanese translation of his selected works was one of my first tasks at Sophia University in the early seventies. Anyway, the four examples you cited from my curriculum are just four expressions of only one concern, namely, to build bridges for the promotion of life, justice, and peace."

After I made this comment, the professor who had invited me smiled and said humorously: "Well, we thought we had invited a philosopher, but we have with us a constructor. Let us hope the budget is not excessive. Anyhow, welcome to our symposium."

"Thank you again," I said, "but, please, let all of us become builders of bridges, let us all join together in the effort to build a truly intercommunicating and peaceful world."

While recalling that exchange, I should like to encourage readers to build bridges toward the future. Such are the four fields of intercommunication with which I have been working until now: (1) hermeneutics, (2) bioethics, (3) global justice, and (4) interreligious spirituality. In reality, these four fields are very much interrelated. If I may be allowed to use a metaphor inspired by the Lotus Sutra I would say: "I have not been traveling in four different vehicles. There is only one vehicle, as the Buddha says. To put it in Japanese: ichijo, namely, just One Vehicle."

When the word "bioethics" appeared for the first time as the title of a book, it was linked to the metaphor of "building bridges." More than three decades have passed since the famous book by Van Rensselaer Potter, Bioethics: Bridge to the Future (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1971), was published. The task of building bridges between the culture of the sciences and the culture of the humanities is still an ideal we have not yet achieved.

Bioethicists have continued to examine the ethical dimensions of problems at the cutting edge of biotechnology, biomedicine, and ecology in their application both to human life and to the protection of the environment. The sphere covered by bioethics is very broad. Cooperation among many different specialties and disciplines is needed in order to confront the challenges of bioethics. For such interdisciplinary work we must not be constrained by the narrowness of each particular field. We must continue building bridges of dialogue and interface, mostly with regard to the relation between life sciences and the values that should frame human life.

Potter, an oncologist at the University of Wisconsin, defined bioethics as "a new discipline that combines biological knowledge with a knowledge of human value systems." According to him, bioethics was supposed to foster a better environment and a better human adaptation to that environment. As a result, both human survival and the survival of both the environment and the civilized world would be promoted. That is why Potter understood bioethics as "a new science of survival." In 1978 The Encyclopedia of Bioethics (Warren T. Reich, ed., 4 vols. [New York: The Free Press]) already defined this discipline as a bridge between the sciences and humanities: "the study of the ethical dimensions of medicine and the biological sciences" (vol. 1, pp. 19-20).

One of the best researchers on the history of bioethics, Albert R. Jonsen, has given a very good portrait of bioethics: "The subject of Bioethics is life, but not as described in the biosciences, which attempt to discern the chemical, physical, and environmental processes that sustain living beings. Bioethics is about life as a value, worthy to be fostered by human decisions and actions. . . . Our choices about reproduction, medicine, and science can affect the ways in which the value we place on life is manifested. We must ask many deep questions about our choices. Bioethics is a scholarly attempt to collect those questions and to seek answers." (Albert R. Jonsen, Bioethics beyond the Headlines [New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2005], p. 2)

I have just described one of the main characteristics of bioethics as an attempt to build bridges between the "bio" of biology and the "ethos" of ethics. The reason that I am making a point of emphasizing this task of building bridges is that I understand not only my commitment to bioethics but my whole life's work precisely with the use of this metaphor of "building bridges." I shall try to explain what I mean by sharing with you some thoughts about the task of building bridges.

The prefix "inter" could be the keyword for such an explanation, expressing the task of being always "on the threshold," "between two poles," "playing the role of a bridge." "Inter" appears in the following four themes: interpretation of texts, interdisciplinary dialogue, intercultural communication, interreligious cooperation.

This is not just abstract reasoning but something that springs from the daily experience of living between two cultures and daily confrontation of the problem of misunderstanding. Therefore one feels the need to build bridges of understanding. Why are we saying that there is a need to translate and to interpret, a need to make an effort to understand? There are many misunderstandings. We need to continuously to put into practice the arts of dialogue, reading, interpreting, and communicating. That is what philosophical hermeneutics is all about as we try to start a dialogue between the text and the reader: the bridge of interpretation. That was my main concern when I started teaching philosophy in the early seventies.

"Inter" is also the key to the other three subjects that were mentioned earlier, namely, my works on bioethics (since the late seventies), on liberation ethics (since the early eighties), and on interreligious encounters (since the nineties). The subjects about which I wrote the books that were referenced above (The Philosophy of P. Ricoeur, Studies of Bioethics, Theology of Liberation, and the translation of The Awakening of Faith) are very much interrelated. They all have to do with the task of building bridges for the promotion of life and peace.

Briefly, I have formulated the four tasks of my life's work in the following way:

Hermeneutics is concerned with the bridge of translation and interpretation between the text and the reader.

Bioethics is concerned with the interdisciplinary bridge of communication between science and human values.

Liberation ethics is concerned with the intercultural bridge of global justice between North and South, between the rich and the poor, the oppressors and the oppressed.

Interreligious encounters are concerned with the interreligious bridge of cooperation to foster and nurture both interior peace of mind and global peace.

All four tasks are vehicles that converge and point to one common mission and destination, namely, the only One Vehicle of building bridges for the promotion of both life and peace.

I finish by stressing one more point about the importance of religions in building bridges for the promotion of life and peace.

I started writing about bioethics in Japanese in the early eighties. The word "bioethics" was not much understood at that time in Japan. In fact, when the Life Science Institute of Sophia University started a program in bioethics, it took some time and effort to obtain from the Ministry of Education sanction for the use of the word "bioethics" as an academic discipline. At that time I was able to publish my first book on bioethics in Japanese thanks to a grant from the Niwano Peace Foundation. It is worth noting that some of the first symposiums on bioethics in Japan were organized by a foundation that was inspired by the Buddhist religious association Rissho Kosei-kai.

I mention just one example, which is particularly relevant, as a witness to the pioneer role played by the Niwano Peace Foundation in this field in Japan. On September 16, 1981, the symposium "Life Sciences and Religion" was held at the Akasaka Prince Hotel under the sponsorship of the Niwano Peace Foundation. The impact of the keynote addresses by such important academic leaders as Professor Itaru Watanabe (from the field of biology) and Professor Koshiro Tamaki (from the field of religious studies) played a decisive role in the beginning and later implementation of bioethics in Japan. At that time I had just started working in this field both at the Life Science Institute of Sophia University, with Professor Kiyoshi Aoki, and in the Institute of Sciences for Survival (Seizon Kagaku Kenkyujo), under the leadership of Dr. Taro Takemi.

I believe that symposium played a key role as witness to the importance of the mutual cooperation between religion and science for the promotion of life, justice, and peace. I stress here that pioneering initiative of the Niwano Peace Foundation. I am especially interested in emphasizing this point because today there is a need for a wider and more profound approach to bioethics, which may be enriched by insights on the meaning of life and death, or about health and sickness, or about pain, suffering, and pleasure that are found in several religious traditions and can be learned through interreligious and intercultural encounters about spirituality.

In closing this personal reflection, I quote the words of a religious leader as an appraisal of the role of religions in the bioethical dialogue about life. These are the words of Pope John Paul II in a 1995 letter to all of the Roman Catholic churches in the world: "It would therefore be to give a one-sided picture, which could lead to sterile discouragement, if the condemnation of the threads to life were not accompanied by the presentation of the positive signs at work in humanity's present situation. . . .

"Among the signs of hope. . . . Especially significant is the reawakening of an ethical reflection on issues affecting life. The emergence and ever more widespread development of bioethics is promoting more reflection and dialogue--between believers and non-believers, as well as between followers of different religions--on ethical problems, including fundamental issues pertaining to human life." (The Gospel of Life: On the Value and Inviolability of Human Life [Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1995], nn. 26-27)

Juan Masia an ordained Roman Catholic priest, was formerly professor of ethical theology and the history of philosophical thought in the Faculty of Theology at Sophia University, Tokyo, where he is now a professor emeritus. From 2004 to 2006 he served as the director of the Institute of Life Ethics at Comillas Pontifical University, Madrid.

This article was originally published in the October-December 2007 issue of Dharma World.


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