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Bioethics might seem a niche interest for physicians and philosophers.

But bioethics stories often end up on page one and send talkback radio into a frenzy. Issues like abortion, euthanasia, transgender rights, IVF, and plummeting birthrates are flashpoints for controversy.

Sydney Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP, who has an Oxford doctorate in bioethics, gave a bioethical “state of the nation” address on 17 October in Melbourne.

“A brief survey of the legislative landscape reveals a troubling trajectory, particularly of erosion of the sanctity of life doctrine in our law and professional ethics, but also in the consciences of our political masters and citizens,” he said, “and not just in Victoria, but throughout Australia and beyond”.

Systemic Dehumanisation

The archbishop was reflecting on Pope John Paul II’s landmark 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae (the Gospel of Life), in the Nicholas Tonti-Filippini Oration sponsored by the Australian Catholic Medical Association.

On the weekend following, 18 and 19 October, at the ACMA annual conference, healthcare workers, lawyers, philosophers and theologians discussed the challenge of responding to contemporary conundrums.

Evangelium Vitae, Archbishop Fisher reminded his listeners, clarified the Catholic position on issues like abortion and euthanasia.

But it was also a brilliantly perceptive diagnosis of a widespread “culture of death” in the West.

“More than a slogan, this jarring phrase captured the pope’s central concern: that threats to human life in modernity are not merely isolated moral failures but symptoms of a cultural mood that systematically devalues the weak,” the archbishop said.

In the 30 years since the former pope published this encyclical, a culture of death has become embedded in legislation and public morality, he added.

“More than just terrible laws plaguing the Western world, we have witnessed the construction of a comprehensive ideological apparatus that champions autonomy abstracted from solidarity and ethics, recasts killing as mercy, and stifles, even criminalises, those who dare to call this out.

“The legal and professional architecture increasingly reflects those very distortions of freedom and truth, the denial of the transcendent, the utilitarian moral calculus, and the totalitarian denial of conscience rights that the late pontiff identified as the culture of death’s intellectual foundations.”

Evangelise the Culture

How should people who champion a pro-life ethic respond?

Archbishop Fisher used the late Nick Tonti-Filippini as an example.

Tonti-Filippini, who died in 2014, was a world-renowned Melbourne bioethicist who combined a boots-on-the-ground knowledge of human dilemmas with a powerful and subtle intellect.

He understood contemporary ethical debates from the inside, as his PhD supervisor was Peter Singer, the notorious utilitarian philosopher. And he understood suffering from the inside, as for most of his life, he had to cope with chronic autoimmune disease.

“He was a wise counsellor to church leaders and laity, served on regulatory bodies, and advised governments,” Archbishop Fisher recalled.

“Even when exhausted by controversy and dialysis, he seemed indomitable, remaining reasoned, courteous, determined and good humoured.”

Pro-life advocates need to propose a different approach to moral reflection about ethics, legalisation and medical practice, he said – “responsibility framing autonomy, generosity rather than egoism, community over individualism, reverent ethics instead of moral balancing acts, cultivation of virtue rather than social vices.” They need to evangelise not just individuals but whole cultures.

Virtuous Lives

The archbishop concluded his address by reflecting on how the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity and the classical moral virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance are needed to evangelise nations which are steeped in the “culture of death”.

In a particularly interesting passage, he linked the virtue of temperance to sound bioethics.

“The culture of life must also be a temperate one. Earlier, I suggested that the sexual revolution and the culture of death go hand in hand: there’s a whole conference to be had on that relationship.

“Suffice it here to say, amongst the complex of connections, unchastity is a major driver of contraception and abortion,” he said.

“Likewise, a kind of medical promiscuity, even addiction, can so over-medicalise reality that we think we have to drug or surgery our way out of fertility, grief, gender, angst – every problem.

“Healthcare professionals must, like the rest of us, learn a certain humility and restraint, accepting that there are proper limits to their art and science.”