On the Integrity of Life
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others. It will also seek to build up the lives of others, to transform the social world, to work to end suffering and injustice, and to seek not only to preserve but also to enhance the global ecological order. Again, for Christians, the demand to enhance the integrity of life is rooted in Christ’s action of healing
and feeding as well as God’s sustaining action on behalf of all creation.without or before power intervene and change things unmindful or unresponsive to the will The order of these demands of responsibility is crucial.respect too easily becomes paternalistic where those with (^14) Enhancing
and wishes of others. Here, we can say, is the backbone, ethically speaking, of overhumanization. Respect without the demand to enhance too easily leads to quietism and an acceptance of the status quo. It assumes that if we do no harm that is all that is required. This is the moral form of hypertheism, a life
in conformity to sovereign will and duty. The point is that respect draws the map of the moral community; enhancement aims to further the goods of that community. So, for instance, we can and ought to use genetic technolo-gies only after the demand for respect is met and then only to enhance, not
to create, forms of life. Designer babies whose traits are selected by parents, new forms of animal life for aesthetic pleasure, and the cultivation of forms of life as stockpiles of body parts or genetic material are not permissible.We must also enhance life and this means that there is the demand to fight (^15)
disease, to engage in experimentation if and when this does not violate respect for life, and labor to extend the health and welfare of the planet’s ecosystem. There is the opening, then, to forms of intervention for enhancing life ranging from stem cell research to genetic technologies.
porary thinkers argue that we ought to recognize only of those beings that can suffer. This seems to make the supreme value the avoidance of suffering or the relief of pain. Another moral outlook, often What are we to respect and enhance? As we will see later, some contem-interests and preferences
associated with the reverence for or sanctity of life, risks making life into a second God, so sacred that we can never under any circumstances take life. The mistake in both forms of ethics is to believe that life which is to be given respect and to be enhanced. What we are to respect and qua life is that
enhance is not life idea. We are to respect and enhance the integration of goods in a life: goods rooted in bodily need and well-being; goods rooted in social interaction; goods rooted in reflective structures of meaning and value; natural goods of qua life, but, rather, the integrity of life. Integrity is a complex
locality. As we will see below, integrity, more profoundly, means having one’s own life united, made whole, by a commitment to what respects and enhances the integration of life in others and one’s self that gives rise to and enacts moral, spiritual integrity.