Humanity and Medicine: Responsibility, Anthropology, and Ethics

Abstract This issue introduces or reintroduces readers to a discussion of bioethics, moral responsibility, and sin. A discussion around similar topics engaged readers of this journal two decades ago, and so this issue provides an opportunity to revisit those—many now classic—papers on the subject. This issue offers diverse perspectives on ethical considerations at the nexus of three (potentially) overlapping ideas: sin, bioethics, and moral responsibility. The description of ideas is intentional, leaving open sufficient space for authors to share interpretations of how they understand each without prejudicing one conception over another. To describe bioethics as a field of inquiry that began in the late 1960s, moral responsibility is an understanding of what one might be held accountable in light of the fact that one performed or failed to perform certain actions when one possessed the ability to do otherwise, or sin as a privation of a particular kind would have yielded an undoubtedly interesting but different set of papers and a much more narrow discussion. The reader finds here four articles that comprise this issue, engaging different Christian traditions and different bioethical topics.