"the values that will determine which lives are worth living, and which not, will always be the province of persons of vicious temperment. If I were asked to decide what qualities to suppress or encourage in the human species, I might first attempt to discover it there is such a thing as a genetic predisposition to moral idiocy and then, if there is, to eliminate it; then there would be no more Joseph Fletchers (or Peter Singers, or Linus Paulings, of James Rachels), and I might think all is well. But, of course, the very idea is a contradiction in terms. Decisions regarding who should or should not live can, by definition, be made only by those who believe such decisions should be made; and therein lies the horror that nothing can ever exorcise from the ideology behind human bioengineering."
David B. Hart, "The anti-theology of the body," Symposium: John Paul II and the ethics of the body, The new Atlantis no. 9 (Summer 2005): 69 (65-73). 73:
John Paul's theology of the body will never, as I have said, be 'relevant' to the understanding of the human that lies 'beyond' Christian faith. Between these two orders of vision there can be no fruitful 'conversation.' All that can ever span the divide between them is the occasional miraculous movement of conversion or the occasional tragic movement of apostacy. Thus the legacy of that theology will be to remain, for Christians, a monument to the grandeur and fullness of their faith's 'total humanism,' so to speak, to remind them how vast the Christian understanding of humanity's nature and destiny is, and to inspire them—whenever they are confronted by any philosophy, ethics, or science that would reduce any human life to an instrumental moment within some larger design—to a perfect and unremitting enmity.
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