Disability's Challenge to Theology

Individually and collectively, we shape and are shaped by technological advancements. Our individual and collective views about what it is to be human are also affected by such technologies. Biotechnological advancements in particular offer new and exciting ways by which we may affect our bodies. But at the same time, the moral and theological ramifications of biotechnological advancements are becoming increasingly salient, especially when such advancements are variously deployed to affect disabled people. How might these ramifications be cast?

In either philosophical or theological terms, biotechnological advancements force ethicists to ask what counts as ability and disability, good or bad, disease or enhancement, and which lives are or aren’t valuable. For example, should we view disabilities as mere or bad differences? If conceived as mere differences, disabilities are simply a part of human diversity. If conceived as bad differences, however, disabilities are something to be “cured.” If we accept that some genetic interventions may be permissible or even required, should such interventions be limited to therapeutic interventions or allowed to promote enhancement? Following this distinction, consider that an intervention that would allow a child with muscular dystrophy to avoid a life with deteriorating motor function could potentially allow another “normal” child to have above average strength.

Like other recent classics in ethics about disability, Devan Stahl’s Disability’s Challenge to Theology: Genes, Eugenics, and the Metaphysics of Modern Medicine starts from Stahl’s own personal experience with disability, including her experience with genetic counseling when considering in vitro fertilization. For the author, what complicates matters is not only that her own liberal Protestant tradition lacks normative ethical-theological guidance, but also that it has been complicit in the eugenics movement. On some views, technologies, including biotechnologies, are themselves morally and metaphysically neutral and are put to good or bad use by their operators, but on other views these same technologies aren’t neutral and their function is already good or bad. And so, in Stahl’s telling, such technologies may problematically be used to bring or not bring about lives that we believe are or aren’t valuable.

To think through her own tradition’s complicity in eugenics and offer a constructive proposal, Stahl’s book moves through history, metaphysics, and ethics. In chapter 1, she charts how liberal Protestants failed to examine nature and metaphysics and therefore become involved with the eugenics movement, highlighting how many liberal Protestants still “have not been able to develop the theology necessary to resist a eugenic future” (27). In chapter 2, she examines the relationship between science and religion, including how, following the Reformation, theology and natural philosophy converged and consequently collapsed the distinction between the natural and supernatural. Given that she later mines Catholic theology for metaphysical insights, we could point to an earlier collapse between this distinction, namely, the univocal metaphysics that William of Ockham and John Duns Scotus offered.

In chapters 3-5, joining other recent critics such as Jeffrey Bishop (The Anticipatory Corpse, The University of Notre Dame Press, 2011) and Gerald McKenny (To Relieve the Human Condition, SUNY Press, 1997), Stahl shows how modern medicine and science operate according to their own implicit metaphysics and identifies the ethics that follows from such a metaphysics. She also offers her own constructive proposal. Given that we are all made in the image and likeness of God, are dependent on God’s grace, and are capable of giving and receiving love, “Christian theology must reject the assertion that some individuals with diseases or disabilities are less than persons” (131). Finally, in chapters 6-8, Stahl concerns herself with “genethics” and its practical implications, including understanding who we are (i.e., metaphysics) and what we are permitted and prohibited to do (i.e., ethics).

I am impressed with Stahl’s candor in both reporting her own experiences and willingness to argue cross-confessionally. Furthermore, while she draws from and speaks to Christian ethicists and theologians, I believe that non-Christian and even non-religious thinkers will benefit from reading her book. Stahl’s book may also find ways for people who don’t share her religious commitments to think about why disabled people should count as members of our shared moral community.

I do want to conclude with two questions, however. First, if love of neighbor requires that we will not only the being but also the well-being of others, and if love requires that we both accept and transform others, what range of genetic interventions might be permissible to promote well-being? And second, if we grant that we are permitted to employ some genetic interventions when deciding to have a child, would she consider the child to be numerically (rather than qualitatively) different than if we didn’t employ such an intervention? While Stahl addresses these questions in brief when discussing our “whatness” and “whoness,” I’d benefit from thinking more with her about them.

Bharat Ranganathan is the Brooks Assistant Professor of Social Justice and Religion at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Bharat Ranganathan

Date Of Review:

October 25, 2023