“Man Is No Mere Object, No Mere Resource: Man Has a Spirit”

The following scholars took part in this scientific-theological discussion:

• Olga Popova, PhD — Head of the Department of Humanitarian Expertise and Bioethics at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences,
• Fr Aleksandr Abramov, Secretary of the Synodal Commission for Bioethics,
• Fr Vladimir Dukhovich, Candidate in Theology and member of the Ethical Committee at Lopukhin Federal Research and Clinical Centre of Physical-Chemical Medicine,
• Prof Georgy Arkhipov, MD, Head of the Faculty of Infectious Diseases, Microbiology and Immunology at NSU.

St Philaret’s Institute was represented by Academic Secretary Alina Patrakova, who is a Candidate in Philosophy. She broadly elucidated the issue of donor anonymity and raised questions relating to the bio-medical objectification of human beings. 

She directed roundtable participants’ attention to the complex of entangled interdependencies between parties involved in donorship. For this specific reason, the practice of donorship is not exclusively a medical question, but unavoidably pulls us into social, legal, economic, cultural, worldview, and psychological interactions.   

“Dependent upon the purpose of donation in a specific case, anonymity may be a principle condition for defending the interests of both donor and recipient, while in others it may be sufficient to observe usual confidentiality and non-disclosure rules vis-à-vis donor and recipient data to third parties,” Alina Patrakova remarked.

In addition, she drew participants’ attention to the “ecological” rhetoric that has arisen around the practice of donorship in recent years, particularly in America. “The essence of such an approach might be summarized in the slogan, “send yourself off for recycling — be an organ donor”. It is symptomatic that here the human being and his body are primary viewed as resources available to serve pragmatic goals. The recipient in need of help entirely disappears from such a picture, meaning that any need to call upon humane attributes such as altruism, sacrifice, gift, or even heroism, also disappears — not surprising as the modern world relates sceptically to such values, more often than not.”

“At the root of this approach we can glimpse the problem of objectification and depersonalization of the human being,” Alina Patrakova remarked. “In practice this might be manifest, for instance, in a suffering patient, together with all his worries, being treated as no more than a “clinical body”, or as some sort of bio-machine that just requires fixing, without considering his psychological condition or other personal specifics. In terms of donor practices, objectification may be manifest in donor organs or tissue being viewed as impersonal, anatomical resources or replacement parts.”

“But a person must not be considered as a mere object or resource, because our Christian understanding of man is that he has a spirit, unlike other living beings”, as Alina Patrakova highlighted. “In discussing bioethical end-of-life questions, the collision between science and faith often arises at this particular flashpoint. The leading Christian anthropological view is trichotomic and understands man as spirit, soul and body. Evidence-based medicine is dominated by a dichotomic, physicalist worldview. In other words, man is assumed to be binomial — a dichotomy of body and consciousness. Here there is no mention of spirit, insofar as the biomedical paradigm, which has positivist foundations, at very least, refrains from making any judgements with regard to non-observable metaphysical reality, nor does it appeal to the experience of divine relation. Given this juxtaposition, it is possible to distinctly clarify our presumptions and the ideological foundations of our viewpoints on man.”

Alina Patrakova’s opinion is that the most important thing to understand and remember in such cases is that a person who finds himself on the brink between life and death is extremely vulnerable to objectification, which on one level represents the triumph of death. She concluded in saying that “at that moment it is important to trace what convictions are determining the actions that follow. After all, both within the medical and within the Christian context, being on that brink between life and death is directly related to taking various decisions relative to the person and to taking actions directly upon him.”