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The Religion & Culture Web Forum

March 2006

Trading Faces: A Case Study in the Science of Identity, Aesthetics, Ethics

This month’s Web Forum is adapted from a roundtable discussion that took place at the Divinity School on February 17, 2006. The discussion was made possible through the Weissbourd Fund for the Society of Fellows in Liberal Arts, and was organized and moderated by Geoffrey Rees. In the three essays presented here, an ethicist, a historian of science, and a philosopher address the ethical issues at stake in the transplantation of human tissue, and of faces in particular. As Rees posed the basic question to the discussants: how much of one's body is replaceable, renewable, or expendable before one ceases to be one's “self?” What are the potential implications for conceptions of personal identity and social responsibility? Moreover, how do we even determine which are the relevant questions to ask?

The essays are:

"Can the Ethical Dimension of a Scientific Discovery be Divorced from Its Historical Aspect?" by Naomi Beck.

"Transplantation and Restoration" by Brian Soucek.

"Imputability, Ascription, Responsibility: Moral Identity and Organ Transplantation," by William Schweiker.

Jeremy Biles and Geoffrey Rees will offer formal responses to the roundtable essays on the discussion board, where readers are invited to join the conversation by posting their comments. Please note that, to eliminate automated spam, the discussion board now requires a login and password. When prompted, please enter the username "rcwf" and the password "discussionboard" to proceed to the forum.

The Martin Marty Center's Religion and Culture Web Forum is an online forum for thought-provoking discussion on the relationship of scholarship in religion to culture and public life. Each month the Marty Center, the research arm of the University of Chicago Divinity School, invites a scholar of religion to comment on his or her own research in a way that "opens out" to themes, problems, and events in world cultures and contemporary life. Scholars from diverse fields of study are invited to offer responses to these commentaries on the forum's discussion board, where the public is also encouraged to post thoughts and reactions to commentaries and invited responses.

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