Nonmaleficence and Hope: a Correlation
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Nonmaleficence and Hope: a Correlation Nathan Carlin 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract
This essay is an application of a method of inquiry described in Nathan Carlin’s 2019 book Pastoral Aesthetics. In Pastoral Aesthetics, Carlin correlates four principles of bioethics with four images of pastoral care to provide new perspectives on these principles by offering inquiry that is theologically informed, psychologically sophisticated, therapeutically oriented, and experientially grounded. In the epilogue of the book, Carlin notes that other correlations are both possible and desirable. In this essay, another correlation is presented. Specifically, the author positions the bioethics principle of nonmaleficence with Donald Capps’s pastoral image of the agent of hope by exploring Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (1998), a memoir about locked-in syndrome. Keywords Pastoralaesthetics . Bioethics . Methodofcorrelation . Thedivingbellandthe butterfly . Ableism . Medical humanities . Disability studies . Chaplaincy In Pastoral Aesthetics (Carlin 2019), I correlate (Tillich 1947) four principles of bioethics with four images of pastoral care. The four principles were taken from Principles of Biomedical Ethics (Beauchamp and Childress 2019), the most-cited book in bioethics. The principles are respect for autonomy, nonmaleficence, beneficence, and justice. The images were taken from Images of Pastoral Care (Dykstra 2005), an influential book in seminaries and chaplaincy programs. The images are the living human document, the circus clown, the diagnostician, and the living human web. My reason for correlating these principles and images was to offer a new method of inquiry in bioethics that is
* Nathan Carlin [email protected]
1
McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics, McGovern Medical School, 6431 Fannin Street, Houston, TX 77030, USA
Pastoral Psychology
theologically informed, psychologically sophisticated, therapeutically oriented, and experientially grounded,1 especially because bioethics has been criticized in recent decades for paying insufficient attention to experience and context (Campbell 2019; Chambers 2015; Kleinman 1995).2 In the epilogue of Pastoral Aesthetics I noted that, while the choices for the correlations advanced in my book are coherent and cohesive, other correlations are both possible and desirable. In this essay, therefore, I put forward a new correlation.3 Specifically, I correlate the principle of nonmaleficence with Donald Capps’s pastoral image of the agent of hope (Capps 2005; also see Capps 2001). To explore this correlation, I examine The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Bauby 1998), a memoir explored in Pastoral Aesthetics (Carlin 2019) in the chapter on nonmaleficence. There, I note Bauby’s reflection that medical progress enabled the possibility of locked-in syndrome: “In the past . . . you simply died [after such a stroke]. But improved recitation techniques have now prolonged and refined the agony” (Bauby 1998,
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