Reading Karl Barth, Interrupting Moral Technique, Transforming Biomedical Ethics

The age of modern biomedical science has raised many difficult ethical questions. Accordingly, leaders in bioethics have articulated methods to direct the on-going discourse while providing the systems necessary for making morally efficient decisions.

In this thought-provoking study, Ashley John Moyse suggests a theory of ethics that interrupts and transforms the contemporary and abstract modes of moral discourse. Moyse moves the moral discussion of bioethics beyond abstract ends, obligations, and common moral categories. At the same time, he challenges readers to take seriously the concrete moral tasks of existence. Moyse engages with Karl Barth's philosophical and theological thinking in order to investigate the moral discussions surrounding biomedical ethics. The book engagingly illuminates a path toward moral discernment that recognizes the significance of human flourishing. According to Moyse, Barth's moral theology not only grounds humans as ontologically relational but also fuels responsibility to, with, and for one's neighbors.

Ashley John Moyse is a Research Associate at both Vancouver School of Theology at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and Trinity College at the University of Divinity, Melbourne, Australia. His research has been presented and published internationally. He is also a co-editor of the forthcoming Correlating Sobornost: Karl Barth in Conversation with the Russian Orthodox Tradition and The Church is Self-Dispossession: Readings in Donald M. MacKinnon's Ecclesiology.