In a recent podcast on New Books Network, Nathan Carlin, PhD, discussed with Claire Clark, PhD, MPH, his 2019 book Pastoral Aesthetics: A Theological Perspective on Principlist Bioethics. In the text, Carlin revisits The Principles of Biomedical Ethics, authored by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress. The book is often called the most influential in the history of bioethics and established an approach known as “principlist bioethics.”
Carlin critically examines principlist bioethics, arguing that moral imagination in bioethics can be enriched by pastoral theologians’ cultivation of theologically-informed, psychologically-sophisticated, therapeutically-oriented, and experientially-grounded aesthetics. To demonstrate this, he positions Beauchamp and Childress’s four principles of bioethics with four images of pastoral care, using Paul Tillich’s method of correlation. The result is a form of interdisciplinary inquiry that will be of special interest to bioethicists, theologians, and chaplains.