Imagine yourself at the bedside of a loved one in the last months of a terminal illness, and he whispers, “I’m dying anyway. Help me end the struggle!” Or imagine a student at the high school where you teach confides, “I just found out I’m pregnant with my creepy uncle’s child. Do I have to carry it to term?” Or a young couple in your small group asks you, “Is it okay to use in vitro fertilization to conceive? What about freezing embryos if we get too many?” Or global pandemic numbers spike, and a congregant asks, “Do we have to wear masks?” or, “Do we have to obey the law that says we can’t meet in large groups?”
Life is messy. Really messy. And it presents humans with all sorts of complicated spiritual, social, and legal challenges about what’s right and wrong, or even good or best. “Ethics” relates to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions.
When ethical questions relate more narrowly to biomedicine and biomedical…
