Living
Ethics: The Way of Wholeness
by Donivan
Bessinger
Living Ethics, as a book project, began life in the 1980s. Medical ethics
was enjoying rapid growth as a newly defined area of specialty, for technologic
innovations were creating conditions in which medical practice decisions were
becoming very much more complex, and not easily clarified by the older rigid
formulas. However, after surveying a number of articles in the medical ethics
field, I could find no hint of any unifying principle among them. Ethical
arguments were advanced from among a broad range of perspectives, often
yielding conflicting analyses.
There was some opinion that, since postmodernism considered "principles" ultimately undefinable, each profession, medicine included, must find within its own traditions it's own special set of values. That seemed entirely unsatisfactory, for ethics, like physics, chemistry, and biology, must have some deep relationship to reality if it is to exert any claim to authority or validate any claim of duty. That is, any special ethic must be based within a globally valid system.
At the same time, I was experiencing an upheaval in my own worldview. It was becoming much more urgent for me to integrate the reductive compartmented thought-world in which I had been trained and was working, with the intuitive poetic feelings of inter-relatedness which were pressing in various ways for recognition. It was during this period, as recounted in Chapter Thirteen, that I rediscovered Albert Schweitzer's formulation of reverence for life and began, as a personal task, to try to relate its intuitions to more recently developed knowledge.
That was also a time of rapid world change. Indeed, the falling of the
Berlin Wall seemed to mirror my own inner situation. Gulf War One soon
followed, with its talk of seeking a post-Soviet "new world order."
In that context, it seemed natural and appropriate to globalize this
study, not only conceptually, but also geopolitically. Hence the book's first
title, Emerging From Chaos: Wholeness, Ethic, and New World Order.
Now at the turn of a new century, though the urgency of a new way of
thinking about our complex world is even greater, the search for a "new
world order" is no longer explicit policy. A new title is in order, better
to emphasize the original motive of the work. We seek a living ethics
which is grounded in the worldview of the whole, and in which life decisions
(at all levels) can be made coherently in recognition of the life system within
which we live and work.
This internet version contains minor updating and correction, and in the
notes I have added some further comment, with links indicated in the text by
double asterisks. There are also links to my later internet work, where the
reader will find references which help expand the concept of our nonlocal
interrelatedness within a living cosmos.
[Contents page] , [TOP] , [Introduction, 1993] , [Chapter 1 ]
Copyright 2000. All rights reserved.