Fall 2011 Values-Based Education Program

newsletter from the

Values-Based Education Program Fall 2011

In this issue The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Medical Triumph and Moral Shame...................................1 The Value of Holocaust Studies.......7 Developing a Personal Philosophy of Nursing....................9

Note from the Editor Raymond j. Devettere professor of philosophy and director of values-based education

For the 2011 edition of the Values-Based Education Newsletter, we are fortunate to have articles from the chairpersons of the two departments that have recently been approved to offer majors in their field of study. Father Thomas Leclerc, M.S., explains the development of the major in his department, formerly the Department of Religious Studies and now newly named as the Department of Theology & Religious Studies. The name change may not mean much to the average reader, but it is significant because it retrieves the importance that most

A New Name, an Old Major........10 The Philosophy Major is Back!....11

Catholic colleges place on theology, especially Catholic theology.

Professor Thomas Wall explains the development of the other restored major, the major in philosophy. Philosophy has always played a major role in the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, where it reminds us of how that tradition honors reason as well as faith. On the academic level, there is no Catholic philosophy any more than there is a Catholic biology, but taking philosophy seriously has long been a hallmark of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition.

Professors Melanie Murphy (history) and Helen Ahearn (nursing) have returned to our pages with two important contributions. Melanie’s insights after her recent moving visit to Holocaust sites in Poland remind us of what happens when basic human values are forgotten. As a historian, she wants us to remember this moral disaster in the hope we will be less likely to repeat it. Helen’s piece explains how her Department of Nursing tries to awaken sensitivity to values in its students, a topic well worth considering as the nation struggles with intense debates about health care.

Finally, Rebecca Skloot’s best-selling book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which the incoming freshmen were assigned to read over the summer, is the subject of

Contact: Raymond J. Devettere Department of Philosophy Emmanuel College 400 The Fenway Boston, MA 02115 valuesnews@emmanuel.edu

my contribution. The book is important for many reasons, and one of them is its ability to awaken us to the need for an education embedding an awareness of moral values throughout the curriculum.

Raymond J. Devettere

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Medical Triumph and Moral Shame Raymond J. Devettere

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ou may well have read, or at least heard of, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the best-selling book by Rebecca Skloot. If so, you already know something about the tragic life of Henrietta Lacks and her amazing immortal cancer cells that have allowed important medical advances in many areas including vaccines, chemotherapy agents and gene mapping. More than 60 media outlets, including The New York Times, have chosen The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks as a best book of 2010. Oprah Winfrey is now co-producing a film for HBO. In case you have not heard or read about Henrietta’s tragic life, her unusual cancer cells, her concerned and confused children, and the morally challenged state of medical research 60 years ago, here is a brief synopsis.

Henrietta was born in a small shack on a dead-end street in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1920. Her name was Loretta Pleasant.

When Loretta was four years old, her mother died delivering her 10th child.

Her father then sent her to live with her maternal grandfather, Tommy Lacks, and Loretta Pleasant soon became known as Henrietta Lacks. Tommy was also raising a cousin of Henrietta’s, David Lacks.

Henrietta and David shared one of the four rooms in Tommy’s log cabin that had no running water.

Henrietta became pregnant at 13 by her cousin David and gave birth to Lawrence Lacks. Four years later, she delivered a daughter named Lucile (“Elsie”) Pleasant; rumors named a man called Crazy Joe, another cousin, as the father.

When Henrietta was 20, she married her cousin, David, and they soon moved to Baltimore where David could work in a steel plant during World War II. Eventually they had three more children. Henrietta soon suffered from syphilis, gonorrhea and the HPV-18 virus, a sexually transmitted disease that places women at high risk for cervical cancer.

In 1951, when she was 30, Henrietta sought medical help at Johns Hopkins.

Unable to pay, she was treated in the public ward. A biopsy confirmed a tragic diagnosis: cervical cancer. Before starting the standard treatment of that time, the insertion of tubes of radium, a surgeon took two additional cervical biopsies, one of healthy cervical tissue and the other of the cervical tumor, and sent the tissues to the tissue research lab at Johns Hopkins.

These additional biopsies were for research and the surgeon never asked for her permission before taking these tissues.

This was not unusual: doctors routinely took extra tissue for research from many of the poor patients, both white and black, in the free clinic at Johns Hopkins.

Practically nobody was raising ethical concerns about this widespread practice; what we know today as bioethics did not exist 60 years ago.

When an assistant in Doctor George Gey’s (pronounced “guy’) research lab cultured Henrietta’s cancer cells, an amazing thing happened: they divided rapidly and the new cells were as robust as the originals. Unlike other cell lines that peter out in our bodies or in the lab, these cells doubled every 24 hours and it looked like the cell line could go on forever. According to one estimate, the cells that originated with Henrietta’s cervical cancer biopsy have by now amounted to more than 50 metric tons. Gey’s assistant labeled the cells “HeLa,” the first two letters of Henrietta’s first and last names.

Scientists have used these HeLa cells in all sorts of important discoveries including the polio vaccine, and they are still using them today. In the early years scientists freely shared them, but by the 1960s, tissue banks, first a nonprofit NIH cell bank (the American Type Culture Collection or ATCC) and then commercial companies, began selling HeLa cells, often at considerable profit.

Henrietta died less than a year after her

diagnosis despite the best treatment that Johns Hopkins could offer. At the end, they tried to control her pain, first with Demerol, then morphine, then other narcotics, and finally injections into her spine, but with little success. She suffered great pain in her final days, as did many people in the era before hospice and palliative care services existed. She probably never knew that her cells were taken for research, or that her cancer cells had the unusual capability to reproduce indefinitely. And no one could have predicted that her cells would play such a major role in so many important medical breakthroughs.

Skloot’s book also relates the difficult lives of Henrietta’s children after she died.

Her oldest daughter, Elsie, died at 15 in the Crownsville State Hospital, formerly known as the Hospital for the Negro Insane. Henrietta’s youngest son went to prison for second-degree murder. Another son went to prison for narcotics trafficking. Her daughter, Deborah, whose story has a prominent role in the book, was sexually abused by a cousin as a young teenager and became pregnant at 16 by another man whom she married two years later. After he developed problems with drugs and alcohol, beat her and cheated on her, she divorced him and remarried, but her second marriage also failed.

Rebecca Skloot weaves many stories together in her fascinating book: the dogged determination of scientists to cure disease and save lives; the cancer cells that do not die; the tragic lives of Henrietta and her children left motherless; the confusion of her children, who now know that their mother’s cells have brought fame and fortune to many while they are impoverished and without access to adequate health care; and Skloot’s own story of how she entered the lives of Henrietta’s family to gather information for her story — Rebecca Skloot herself is very much a main character in the web of stories that she relates. continued on page 2

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (continued from page 1) Henrietta was black and poor, the doctors at Johns Hopkins were white, and this has suggested to some that racism played a role in the story of the HeLa cells.

Is Henrietta’s story the story of racist white scientists doing something malicious to a poor black woman and her family for the sake of science and profit? Some commentaries and reviews of the book, and many blogs, suggest that it is.

Yet Skloot herself has said in interviews that her book is not about racist white scientists doing something malicious to a poor black woman. She points out that researchers at Johns Hopkins were taking cells from numerous patients in the charity wards for decades, regardless of their race, and that for years most scientists did not even know that the HeLa cells they were using had originated in a tumor on the cervix of a poor black woman.

Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah, also believed that taking her mother’s cells without her permission was not an instance of racism. At one point she said to Skloot: Everybody always yellin, “Racism!

Racism! That white man stole that black woman’s cells! That white man killed that black woman!” That’s crazy talk. We all black and white and everything else — this isn’t a race thing.

There are some serious ethical lapses in Skloot’s story of Henrietta’s care, but racism on the part of scientists is not one of them. Yet racial discrimination did exist in the background of the story. The town of Clover, Virginia, where Henrietta grew up in the 20s and 30s, was racially segregated, as were its schools. And the public wards for the poor at Johns Hopkins where Henrietta was treated were also segregated.

Yet by the early 1950s, it was widely understood that segregated public facilities were inherently unequal.

An important feature of Skloot’s book that has value for us at present is that it raises numerous important questions about medical ethics. Today some of these questions are settled; we know the right 2

answers. We will look at four of these questions. But for other questions, we are still looking for the right thing to do and the right way to think; these questions remain unsettled and unsettling. We will look at three of these questions. Then, in the conclusion, we will look at what is an embarrassing question and ask what we can do for the future.

First settled ethical question: Was it morally wrong in the 1940s and 1950s for physicians at Johns Hopkins to biopsy cells for research from numerous poor patients without the voluntary informed consent of these patients? We now know that this was clearly immoral. And we can think of several reasons why this was wrong. First, doctors taking biopsies from patients for their research without their knowledge and consent undermines trust in doctors, and we need trust between doctor and patient.

Second, doctors using our bodies for their research without our knowledge and consent demeans us by treating us no differently than lab animals. Good ethics insists that we treat other people with respect and recognize their dignity as human persons. The fact that Henrietta and all the other poor patients at Johns Hopkins were unable to pay for their medical treatment makes no moral difference and is not a license for taking their tissue for research.

Today, bioethics insists that all people, rich or poor, give voluntary informed consent before any clinical procedure or behavioral investigation is performed for research, and federal law requires it.

Second settled ethical question: Was the research done on children in the early 1950s at Crownsville State Hospital, which most probably included Henrietta’s daughter Elsie, morally wrong? Physicians studying epilepsy needed clear X-rays of the brain, but the fluid surrounding the brain was making the pictures cloudy.

In an effort to obtain crisp X-rays, one experiment consisted of drilling holes in the skulls of 100 children suffering from epilepsy to drain the fluid and fill the space around the brain with air. This provided better X-rays for science but caused crippling headaches, dizziness, seizures,

and vomiting in the two or more months it took the children’s bodies to replace the fluid. In another study at Crownsville during this time, physicians inserted metal probes into the brains of children with epilepsy to learn more about the disease.

In neither case did scientists seek parental permission for their studies.

Scientists did not name the children they studied, but Henrietta’s daughter, Elsie, was most probably one of them — she had epilepsy and she was an inpatient at Crownsville when the studies on the children were conducted. We now know that the painful brain research on these children was clearly morally wrong and would have been unethical even if their parents had consented, which they did not.

And today such research would be illegal as well, especially since federal law has special protections for children not yet 18.

Third settled ethical question: Was drawing the blood of Henrietta’s immediate family in 1973 morally wrong?

Physicians needed the children’s blood because many of the cell lines they were using in research were contaminated by cells with a rare genetic marker found almost exclusively in black Americans.

Scientists believed that the widely used HeLa cells were the source of the contamination and they wanted the DNA of Henrietta’s family so they could identify which of their cell lines were contaminated by the HeLa cells.

A post-doctoral fellow named Susan Hsu contacted David Lacks, Henrietta’s husband and the father of her four surviving children. Years later, Dr. Hsu told Skloot that she explained to David that the blood was needed “to get HLA antigen” to do a “genetic marker profile” which would let them deduce “a lot of Henrietta Lacks (sic) genotype,” and that David apparently understood what she said. But David told his children that the blood draw was a test to see whether they had the cancer that killed their mother. Obviously, there was a terrible misunderstanding. This is no surprise because Dr. Hsu came from China and her explanation about “HLA antigen,” “genetic marker profile” and “genotype” in accented English was given

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to a man who had never finished the fourth grade.

Three of Henrietta’s surviving children (the fourth was in prison at this time) later met with Dr. Hsu and had the same impression as their father — the blood draw was a cancer test for their benefit.

They consented to the blood draw, but clearly their consent was not informed consent. Medical researchers have a responsibility to obtain informed consent — people have to know and understand what is going on. In this case, Henrietta’s children were giving blood in a project designed to identify contaminated cell lines being used in research, but they thought it was a blood test for cancer. Today, bioethics insists that researchers have a responsibility to ascertain that people consenting to a procedure such as a blood draw and DNA analysis for research purposes understand its purpose, and federal law requires this consent to be informed consent. Hence we now know that the blood draws from the family members to resolve an issue in research were clearly immoral. The children consented, but it was not informed consent.

Fourth settled ethical question: Was it morally wrong for someone at Johns Hopkins to release Henrietta’s medical records and for an academic press to publish excerpts from her medical records?

We now know that it was morally wrong for the hospital to give Michael Gold information from her medical records and also morally wrong for the State University of New York (SUNY) Press to publish Michael Gold’s book, A Conspiracy of Cells, in 1975. Today, bioethicists agree that these actions of disclosure and publication violate patient confidentiality and privacy, and federal law now protects these values.

What happened to Henrietta (performing biopsies for research and releasing her medical records without family consent) and her children (X-ray and brain probe research on Elsie and drawing blood for research from other siblings without making sure they understood the purpose of the blood draw) most probably would not have happened in recent decades. And

if these events did happen in the past 30 years, they would immediately be recognized as illegal and unethical.

So much for the settled ethical questions. However, and this is where it becomes interesting for people concerned with cutting-edge issues in bioethics and the law, as well as ethical theory, Skloot’s book also introduces another set of ethical questions that are not settled and where we do not have ethical consensus. There are at least three such questions and they are both unsettled and unsettling because we simply do not yet know what is ethical and what is not, what is right and what is wrong. This is not to say there are no right answers. There are right answers, we just do know them yet.

First unsettled ethical question: Who owns or controls our cells, and the DNA information in those cells, once they are outside our body? Human tissues and cells in biobanks have become scientifically important and commercially very profitable, but we have not yet developed ethical or legal guidelines for the use of these tissues and cells. As long as cells are in our bodies we control them and in some cases we can legally profit from them, as when a person sells blood, sperm, or eggs (although there are some serious moral objections about selling sperm and eggs).

But once our cells and tissues are outside the body the question of control and ownership becomes ambiguous.

Medical research collects cells for research in many ways. For example, consent forms at teaching hospitals usually include a line indicating that tissue can be used for education and research, and most of us sign them without hesitation.

The same is often true for tissue removed during surgery, or for umbilical cords and placentas after childbirth. What was once considered medical waste is now valuable research material. Hospitals often now sell our “medical waste” to companies that resell it to research laboratories or store the genetic information in vast tissue databases that doctors can access for a fee.

Another source of cells and tissues for research is the mandatory newborn screening programs that have existed for years in

every state. In Massachusetts, for example, state law requires hospitals to collect blood from every newborn and send it to a state lab that screens it for dozens of inherited genetic diseases. Unlike some other states which destroy the blood after the screening, Massachusetts has been storing all the blood drawn for newborn testing for decades, and these dried blood spots can be used for research unless parents realized that they could have opted out of research on their child’s blood by checking three boxes on a form they sign at the time of delivery.

Almost all parents leave the boxes for research unchecked, probably because nobody explained it to them and new parents are understandably preoccupied welcoming a new baby into their family.

But the failure of parents to take the initiative to opt out of releasing their child’s blood for research (the screening for disorders is mandatory unless the parents can present a religious objection to testing babies for disease) means they have released their baby’s cells for research and allowed the state to have access to their child’s genetic identity as well as considerable information about their own genetic profile.

Law and ethics have not caught up with the legal control of cells once they are outside the body, so courts are left struggling with the controversies that arise. Skloot discusses the famous case of leukemia patient John Moore, who had his spleen removed at UCLA 25 years after Henrietta died. Scientists were able to develop an immortal cell line called Mo from his spleen (somebody could write a book, The Immortal Life of John Moore) and obtained a patent for his cell line.

When Moore discovered that his doctor and UCLA were making money from his spleen cells, he sued. He lost his case when the California Supreme Court overturned an appeals court decision in 1990. The court ruled that it would “hinder research” if people had a property interest in their cells after they were removed from the body. In other words, we do not own or control our cells once they are outside our bodies. continued on page 4

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (continued from page 3) Thus far, only a few other court cases have been concerned with control of human cells outside the body. In Florida, families affected by Canavan disease (an inherited, incurable genetic disease that affects children in the first year of life) created a repository of tissue samples to enable a physician-researcher at Miami Children’s Hospital Research Institute named Dr. Matalon to develop a genetic test for the disease. He was eventually able to do this and to obtain patent protection for both prenatal and carrier tests for Canavan disease, thus generating income for himself and his hospital. When the parents found out about this, they sued the institute because the patent and the profits were not what they had in mind when they donated tissue to him. However, they lost the case. In 2003, a court said that it would “cripple medical research” if the families retained control of the tissue after they added it to a research repository.

In Missouri, Dr. Catalona, a wellknown researcher on prostate cancer at Washington University who developed the famous PSA test, had collected prostate tissue samples from thousands of his patients and wanted to take them with him to his new appointment at Northwestern University in Chicago. At his request, many of his patients asked Washington University to release their tissue, which they had given to him so he could take it with him to Northwestern. Washington University refused and then filed suit against the doctor claiming that it, and not the patients or Dr. Catalona, now owned the stored tissue. In 2007, a federal court ruled that the patients no longer had the power to allow Dr. Catalona to take the tissue samples that they had given him to his new academic appointment.

However, and this shows the confusion that now exists, the court said that the patients could order that their cells be destroyed. The court reasoned that the people who donated the cells were, in a sense, participating in research, and federal law governing human participants in research allows people to withdraw from research at any time. Thus, the court reasoned, people could “withdraw from 4

research” by having their cells destroyed, but they could not get them back from the university and then give them to Dr. Catalona for his research. This gives some idea of how confusing the situation is.

These cases reveal a legal trend whereby donated human cells are considered as property: once you donate them you lose control over them. Yet the picture is ambiguous. NIH’s Office of Human Research Protection (the OHRP), for example, classifies donors of tissue for research as human subjects and human subjects can withdraw from research at any time. On the one hand, you can think of your cells as your property and once you donate or sell them you have lost control; on the other hand, you can think of your cells as part of you participating in research and thus you can withdraw them from research by destroying them at any time, but you cannot have them returned to you.

And so we are faced with a major legal question: are cells like property donation, in which case the donor has lost control, or are cells a continuation of the person’s body, in which case the donor would still be able to withdraw them from research at any time? At the present time, the whole legal question of who controls donated cells and tissue is unsettled and unsettling.

The ethical question of who should control human cells outside the body, and the genetic information contained in them, is also unresolved in the ethical literature.

In view of the increasing importance and commercial potential of cells outside the body, as well as of harm that can be done now that we know these cells contain very personal information in the DNA, the ethical question remains an unsettled and unsettling challenge.

Second unsettled ethical question: Should cell donors and their heirs receive profit from donated cells that are found to be valuable? More particularly, should Henrietta’s children receive some of the profits from her cells? Many commentators on Skloot’s book argue that they should and our initial reaction might lead us to say that they should. Certainly there is an upsetting irony when Henrietta’s cells

have made so much money in later decades while her family continues to struggle financially. Some argue that it is only fair and just that Henrietta’s family receive some money from the profits her cells now generate; some argue that the family should receive reparations because the cells were taken without her consent; some argue that cell donors are truly partners in research and thus they and their estate should profit from it along with the researchers; and some argue that compensation is due because the people providing cells are providing the necessary raw material for something that has become very lucrative for others.

These are complicated issues and, at this point, we simply do not know whether or not there is an ethical responsibility to compensate those whose tissue has enabled scientists, universities, or companies to make a profit. The compensation question is difficult for many reasons. First, there is often no way of knowing what tissue might be worth when it is donated. Most of the tissue collected at Johns Hopkins in Henrietta’s time was worthless; her cancer cells were the big exception.

Second, some cells do not generate profits for years. The HeLa cells did not make any money until years after they were cultured and they are still making money now sixty years after they were taken. This introduces a practical problem — how long should a claim of compensation last?

Third, most cells used in research are now rendered anonymous; that is, the donors’ names are removed from the samples. If donors are going to receive a share of future profits, then their samples will be identified. This introduces practical problems as well as privacy issues. There was no DNA testing in Henrietta’s day, but today we know that a vast amount of both personal and family information is embedded in the nucleus of our cells.

Identifying cells for compensation purposes will make it more difficult to protect the donor’s genetic information that would be of great value to insurance companies and employers, and could easily lead to new forms of harmful discrimination.

However, the law does permit people

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to sell their blood, and few have ethical problems with that. Skloot mentions the story of Ted Slavin, a hemophiliac infected with hepatitis B from transfusions. His blood contained antibodies for hepatitis B and Ted’s doctor told him that those antibodies were valuable for scientists working to develop a vaccine for hepatitis B, so he sold his blood to pharmaceutical companies for research. But Slavin knew before giving his blood that it had a special value; researchers did not know ahead of time that Henrietta’s cells would be so valuable.

Moreover, hospitals can sell leftover tissues from biopsies and surgeries.

GulfStream Bioinformatics of Lexington, for example, has purchased hundreds of thousands of tissue samples from medical centers (including Beth Israel Deaconess) to form a vast tissue bank that subscribers can access to compare their tissue samples with those of other patients with similar histories and responses to therapy. Tissue banking will help identify the genetic basis of diseases and develop specific drug targets. So some ask: if hospitals and biobanks make money from our leftover cells and tissue, shouldn’t we or our families share in the profits? We are looking for a good answer to that question.

These two unsettled and unsettling questions bring us to a third, and more theoretical unsettled question: How should we approach these unsettled questions regarding who controls our cells and their genetic information once they are outside our bodies, and who gets to share in the profits those cells might generate?

The question of approach is a theoretical question, but it is important because the approach we adopt will shape our ethical conclusions.

At the moment, there are two major approaches to developing the ethics of using cells outside the body for research and profit. The first emphasizes rights and the second emphasizes the common good.

In the rights-based approach, we think of our cells and tissues as our property. We own them. We may want to give them away or we may want to sell them or we may want to invest them by letting others

use them and if they make a profit then we should receive a share of those profits.

The court cases show that the legal approach is primarily the property approach. Judges are taking property law and by analogy extending it to our cells and tissues. Once we donate property to someone it becomes theirs. However, we can donate property with restrictions, as people sometimes do for endowments, and we can sell our property if there is a market for it. So, some say we have a right to a part of the income our cells might generate. The analogy with property, what we own, may be the best that courts can do although notice that the courts are also concerned about the possible disruption of medical research if people retain too much control of cells after donation.

Lately, some ethicists have been suggesting another approach: instead of beginning with my right to control my cells and profit from them, we might begin with my interest in promoting the common good.

Human cells are very valuable for today’s research. Rather than rights and ownership and money, the better model might be an idea generated from our common humanity: if my cells, especially cells that are left over from biopsies or surgeries or childbirth, and were formerly medical waste, can help science and save lives, then maybe I should simply think of them as a biological heritage that I share with all other members of the species and gladly donate them so they can be contribute to the common good. After all, I did nothing to earn my cells; they were a gift to me from my parents and malignant cells are an undesired genetic mutation.

The more noble ethical response might be framed as making a better life for people by helping science develop vaccines, better chemotherapy agents, vast tissue banks and so forth. Instead of seeing our cells as something we own and might make a profit from, we can see them as a gift we can give for others. Certainly companies and individuals may profit from our cells — we do live in a market-driven society — but not everything we do personally has to be market driven. Some people do sell their blood, but many donate it for others.

We could think of donating our tissues and cells for the good of others, and one day we may even share directly in that common good by receiving, for example, a vaccine. Naturally we have to protect our genetic information, but this is routinely done by removing personal identification from cells and tissues used for research.

We can see both of these approaches in Skloot’s story of the Lacks children.

Henrietta’s sons tend to feel that the family has a right to receive some of the money the cells have generated, but her daughter, Deborah, recently deceased, tended to focus on the great good that her mother’s cells enabled science to accomplish, and as she understood more and more, she became proud of her mother’s contribution.

In response to the question of whether Henrietta’s family, who have lacked steady access to basic health care, should receive some of the profits the HeLa cells are generating, it would be well to consider how that would not get us very far in addressing the real social problem: changing the social and political structure so all Americans will have access to needed health care. Sharing profits with people and their heirs if their tissues make big money helps some but still leaves millions of Americans, not all of them poor, without adequate health care because of the costs, complexities and inadequacies of our health care insurance system.

Finally, there is an ethical question that all of us should find unsettling and embarrassing: how could it happen that so many doctors, well-respected universities and hospitals, and government agencies could engage in research on human beings that was so clearly unethical during the middle decades of the 20th century? Doing biopsies for research without patient consent was just one example of a long list of grossly unethical research practices in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Skloot identifies some of them: the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study and the research of Dr. Chester Southam, chief of virology at the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, who injected hundreds of people with HeLa cancer cells without their consent. continued on page 6

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (continued from page 5) There were many other unethical biomedical and behavioral experiments on people without their consent during these decades. An early criticism emerged in 1966, when Dr. Henry Beecher, a professor in anesthesia research at Harvard Medical School, wrote a meta-study in the New England Journal of Medicine of 22 published research protocols that were clearly unethical (he did not report on 28 others due to lack of space). The research occurred at such places as Harvard, Georgetown, U Penn, Duke, Emory, and was often funded by NIH as well as large pharmaceutical companies. He concluded that ethically defective research was the rule, not the exception.

Reform finally began after Peter Buxton, a young researcher at the U.S. Public Health Service who had been raising objections with his supervisors for six years about the still ongoing Tuskegee syphilis study in vain, finally went to the New York Times in 1972 with the story of that grossly unethical study. The press coverage and his later testimony at a congressional hearing, chaired by Senator Ted Kennedy, led to the creation of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects in Biomedical and Behavioral Research by Congress. The Commission met from 1974 to 1978 and recommended the ethical principles and review boards at each institution that have become the central features of the federal laws governing research involving human participants today.

As time has gone on, even more information about the dark world of medical research prior to the National Commission has come to light. In the 1990s, for example, a special advisory committee on radiation experiments examined the three decades before the reform began and found numerous cases where medical researchers at highly respected institutions ignored even the prevailing ethical standards of the day.

For example, during the mid-20th century, researchers at the Universities of Chicago and California injected, without consent, plutonium into dying patients to study its impact on the human body. And 6

researchers injected uranium into dying patients without consent at the University of Rochester and at the Massachusetts General Hospital. These examples are but a tip of the iceberg of how vulnerable patients were exploited in the mid-20th century.

How could so many dedicated doctors and researchers conduct so many unethical experiments on so many people for so long without creating a major uproar in the fields of medical and behavioral research?

I would suggest that this oversight can be described as a failure of moral awareness. Not all bad things are done by bad people. Good people often do bad things without realizing it, and this often happens when good people are trying so hard to do good that they fail to see the bad embedded in their work. In the case of medical research, the researchers were trying to find cures and vaccines to help people live better lives. Their effort to do good apparently blinded them to the harms they caused by not respecting the dignity of their fellow human beings.

The surgeon should have known that surgically removing Henrietta’s cells from her cervix for research without her permission was wrong. In a famous 1914 case known as Schloendorff, Justice Cardozo stated clearly: “A surgeon who performs an operation without his patient’s consent commits an assault, for which he is liable in damages.” In 1947, the first of the Nuremberg principles published after the famous trials of Nazi doctors who had experimented on concentration camp inmates clearly stated that doctors should not do research on anybody without their voluntary consent.

Yet a few years after the Nuremberg trials, surgeons at Johns Hopkins took the biopsies from Henrietta for research without her permission or consent, and thought nothing of it, and nobody thought to criticize them for it. Nor did anybody criticize the physicians at Crownsville who drained fluid surrounding the brains of sick children, or the thousands of other harmful research interventions on patients that doctors were performing without consent in those decades. And probably none of

these doctors thought they were doing something wrong. Moral awareness had taken a holiday.

Perhaps the most unsettling thing about the loss of moral awareness is how common it is and how likely it is that it affects all of us. We can think back in our own lives about the harms we would not have done had we only thought about it more carefully.

So what can we do? One thing that will help us avoid moral blindness is making an effort to see the full spectrum of important values in what we are doing, to raise consciousness as it were.

That is part of what we mean by a values-based education at Emmanuel. We want our students to learn about the sciences but also about the inescapable ethical values permeating those fields. Behavioral and biological scientists often need to use people and animals for their research, and we want our scientists and our students to raise consciousness about morally right and wrong ways to involve human beings and animals in scientific research.

The same is true for other areas of study — we want our instructors and our students to raise questions about ethical issues — about what is good or bad, right or wrong — in history, in nursing, in management, in human resources, in business, in economics, in education, in religion, in political science, in information technology, and so forth. The Catholic intellectual tradition that inspired the founding of this College has a long history of taking ethical values seriously, and we want to continue that tradition in the total education experience that we provide.

When we talk about values-based education, we are talking about moral values, about human well-being in both individual and social terms. Raising consciousness about moral values in our courses is one way we can lessen the insidious loss of moral awareness that happened in those who took Henrietta’s cells and the blood of her children without informed consent, who drilled holes in the skull of her hospitalized daughter and stuck probes into her brain for their research, and who released and published her medical records without permission.

Emmanuel College – Newsletter from the Values-Based Education Program

One of the more important lessons we can learn from the story of Henrietta, her immortal cells, her misinformed family, and the sad state of medical research that lost its moral compass in the mid-20th century, is the need to recognize how quickly the effort to do good can undermine awareness of other values inescapably involved in the situation. In Henrietta’s story, values such as respect for persons and recognition of human dignity even of the poorest and sickest among us, were the values that were not noticed. A valuesbased education is one small way we try to prevent that blindness in our students and in our own lives and work.

The realization that our moral awareness can be easily lost, that we might ourselves be wandering in moral shadows, that future generations might expose our immoral activities that we never saw despite our desire to be good human beings, that we might be no better in perceiving moral values than so many medical researchers half a century ago, suggests that we need to focus constantly on values as well as facts and data in the courses we teach and the lives we live. Without constant reminders that our behavior has not just factual but moral consequences, moral awareness will take another holiday.

The Hebrew Bible tells a story about the loss of moral awareness. King David, despite his many wives and concubines, saw a woman he wanted. Unfortunately, she was married to Uriah, one of his generals who was away on assignment, but that did not stop David and the woman became pregnant. He tried to conceal his adultery and when that failed, he arranged a military mission that resulted in the death of Uriah and left him free to marry her before her pregnancy became known and caused a scandal for him. Her name was Bathsheba, and she and David later become the parents of the great king Solomon, an ancestor of Jesus. David never saw how immoral his behavior was until a prophet named Nathan spoke up and told him in so many words that he was a despicable adulterer and a cold-blooded murderer responsible for the death of Uriah. To his credit, David Fall 2011

acknowledged his moral blindness and repented.

In science and in life we need more Nathans, people with moral awareness who see what everyone else fails to see or chooses not to see. The three doctors at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn who resigned in 1963 over Dr. Chester Southam’s research that involved injecting patients with malignant HeLa cells without their consent, research that was partially funded by the U.S. Public Health Service and the American Cancer Society, were Nathans. Dr. Henry Beecher, the Harvard Medical School professor who wrote the 1966 article in The New England Journal of Medicine that exposed the serious ethical lapses that his colleagues never saw in numerous well-regarded medical studies, was a Nathan. Peter Buxton, the researcher at the U.S. Public Health Service who went to the New York Times in 1972 with the Tuskegee syphilis study after his superiors at the U.S. Public Health Service ignored his objections, was a Nathan.

One of the things we seek in a valuesbased education at Emmanuel is helping our faculty and our students raise ethical questions when course material introduces situations involving moral disvalues that others simply do not see or choose not to see. In this way, we hope to transform society and ourselves for the better, and thereby remain faithful to the mission of the College. S

The Value of Holocaust Studies Melanie Murphy, Associate Professor of History

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espite having taught aspects of the genocide of the Jews of Europe in several classes for a number of years, only this past April did I visit some key sites: the scant remains of the Warsaw Ghetto, Oskar Schindler’s factory, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. The trip was sponsored by Salem State University and the group was composed of historians, teachers and people with connections to Holocaust survivors; in short, an informed and serious group. Seeing the remains of death camps is demanding and draining.

Assistant Professor of Nursing Helen Ahearn’s article, “Reflections on a Visit to Buchenwald: The Value of Caring,” in the Fall 2009 Values-Based Education Newsletter described well the sadness that visiting sites such as Buchenwald evokes.

When I saw the remains of the Warsaw Ghetto and heard descriptions of life there, I was horrified. A new film, A Film Unfinished, will show you why.

How to present the history of the Nazi genocide is an ongoing question not only for history teachers, but for museum curators and really anyone involved with discussion of it in the public sphere. I returned from my trip more interested in this question as well as more aware of the complexity of it. In a New York Times story (February 19, 2011), “Auschwitz Tailors its Story for New Generation,” the director of Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum describes proposed changes to the highly visited but largely explanation-free site. Interactive media, commonplace in contemporary museums, is not proposed, but more signage and background information for visitors are planned. Currently, continued on page 8 7

The Value of Holocaust Studies Auschwitz is relatively unadorned with only one sign of Nazism (if you don’t count the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign) that I could see — a picture of Hitler in an interrogation room. Visitors inevitably rely on guides for information as they tour the complex.

Birkenau today is a vast outdoor space, unadorned and empty. It is almost a surprise that one can walk right to the end point of the railroad tracks, the very spot where people would disembark and selections would ensue. Perhaps younger generations do need more information than is now provided, but the dignity and the immediacy of the sites impressed me and I am glad to have seen the unmodernized Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Somewhat surprisingly, the Holocaust did not emerge in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War as a compelling topic for study and discussion. It was not until the 1960 publication of Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews, along with Eichmann’s capture and subsequent trial in 1961, that the wartime genocide truly entered public discourse in the Western world. And only in the 1990s did Holocaust studies become an established academic discipline, chiefly in history.

My trip to Poland brought home to me the urgency of the study of the Holocaust in Poland. In the past, I had assigned for my classes books such as Henry Grynberg’s The Victory, an ironically titled novel that shows how the Allied victory over the Nazis was hardly a guarantee of safety for Poland’s Jews, who were often not welcomed home, mainly because the people who had taken over their property were not eager to return it.

As the result of my trip, I will now include more contextual accounts. For example, a fascinating author who has lived in New England, but whom I had to go to Kielce to discover, is Nechama Tec. As a young girl, she survived the war in hiding in Kielce. In middle age, she began to write about her experience of the Shoah, particularly studying what motivated the Polish-Christians who helped Polish Jews, as opposed to being passive or actively

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harming them. The movie Defiance was based on Tec’s account.

From her writing and other work, it is apparent that even after the war many Poles who helped Jews did not want it made public. One commentator has noted a great contrast between the way that the inhabitants of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in France felt about their rescue operation (proud, vocal) as compared with how many Poles felt about their rescue work (restrained, silent). Thinking about the reasons and implications of this, or why for instance Irena Sendlerowa was honored only late in life in her native land, gives us some sense of the historical work yet to be done, especially by Polish historians themselves.

As Stanislaw Krajewski, a leading participant in Jewish renewal as well as in Jewish-Catholic dialogue in Poland, wrote in 2009: When it comes to deeper consideration of the Holocaust — its effects on the vision of the world and civilization, its unprecedentedness, its role as a turning point in history, its links with modernity, its consequences for Christianity and for the nature of Europe — although these issues hold no threat to material interests, Poland has never been an important center for reflection….Nevertheless, I observe with satisfaction, though with a certain incredulity, that among the young people willing to become deeply involved in these issues are the most talented and the most intellectually astute university students. It seems that in studying the history of the Jews they want to better understand not only the Jews and their fate, but themselves.”

In my classes, I have learned that the story of one or a few individuals arouses student interest more than general histories. One work, for example, students seem particularly willing to engage with is The Nazi Officer’s Wife, the amazing story of an Austrian Jewish woman who survived

the war by assuming a gentile identity and marrying a Nazi party member who became an army officer.

Another provocative work is I. B. Singer’s Shosha. Students who read this work often protest that the characters should “do something” or “go somewhere,” resisting what they saw as fatalism on the part of the people in this novel.

Only one student said, “Where could they go? What could they do now?”

Sometimes I have assigned Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner because students are fairly divided on whether Haffner does, in fact, “defy Hitler.” Most significant to me about that work is how it suggests that it is better to question, defy, or attack political or social abuse and injustice earlier rather than later.

My purpose here is not to give capsule reviews of books about the Holocaust, but to suggest how varied the works can be and that picking the best ones to convey certain significant points about the Holocaust is no simple task.

Historians and others want to keep our awareness of genocides alive so we can prevent such terrible evils in the future.

Professors Katrin Križ and Caroline Reeves of the sociology and history departments, respectively, have presented courses on genocide. And two recent Emmanuel graduates, Kayla Zaremske ’11 and Kaitlyn Soares ’11, presented their work on the Holocaust in a poster session during a meeting of the New England Historical Society at Emmanuel in October 2011.

In her article on Buchenwald in the newsletter, Professor Ahearn ended by reaffirming her commitment as a nurse to an ethic of care. As a historian, I would reaffirm my commitment to keeping the history alive so we can learn from it.

Studying the Holocaust and visiting the places where it happened moves me, and I hope my students, to recommit to the historical knowledge that will help people of good will bring an end to genocide. S [My main source is The Holocaust: Voices of Scholars, edited by Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs and published by The Centre for Holocaust Studies, Jagiellonian Univeristy and AuschwitzBirkenau State Museum, Cracow, 2009.]

Emmanuel College – Newsletter from the Values-Based Education Program

Developing a Personal Philosophy of Nursing Helen Ahearn, Assistant Professor of Nursing, Graduate & Professional Programs

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nstitutions such as colleges and medical centers have mission statements and philosophies which help us to understand what they are about and whether or not we want to be associated with them.

For example, we state in our Department of Nursing philosophy: The following beliefs frame the educational experiences of the registered nurse student in this value-centered baccalaureate program. The professional nurse is committed to the promotion of health and wellness for all persons. The recipients of health care are unique and have distinct emotional, physical, spiritual and social needs to which the professional nurse must respond. The nurse as caregiver uses knowledge and caring activities to affect positive outcomes for care recipients within the context of their environment. Assuming a leadership role in health care, s/he advocates for access to health care for all members of society, particularly vulnerable populations.

These beliefs shape our work in the department. We also believe that it is important for our individual nursing students to develop an explicit personal philosophy and mission that will influence and direct their practice as they interact with patients and colleagues. And so the question arises: how do we go about helping our students develop a personal and professional philosophy?

Basically, we do this in three ways. First, new students in the Bachelor of Science in Nursing program are asked to write a personal statement explaining why they want to enter the program, what their preparation is, what their goals are, and how they want Fall 2011

to achieve these goals within the discipline of nursing. This essay serves as the basis for developing their philosophy of nursing, which is a course requirement in Concepts of Professional Practice, the first course they take in the program. Writing the personal statement is a useful endeavor as it directs the student to reflect on her/his values, beliefs and reasons for practicing nursing.

Second, new students engage in a group values-clarification exercise wherein they not only identify their own values and beliefs, but also listen to the values and beliefs of others. This helps them to realize that there are different cultural values inherent in belief systems.

Among the values that emerge in the personal statement are caring, the belief that there is a God and an afterlife, the desire to help people, the belief that they can alleviate suffering, and the belief that their nursing care can make a difference in the quality of life among patients. For many, the choice of nursing as a profession is a reflection of their belief that they have been somehow called to do this work.

After writing the initial personal statement and participating in the values clarification exercise, the students then proceed to the third phase: we ask them to write a statement of their personal philosophy. This assignment requires them to reflect on several prepared questions/ statements, such as, “What is your central belief about the individual human person and his/her potential?” or “What is society…of whom is it composed…what is the nature of relationships between people and the environment?” and “What are your beliefs about nursing…who are its recipients of care…what are the rights and responsibilities of care recipients…of nurses, etc.?”

Examples from various students’ philosophy statements include the following excerpts: “The nurse must be sensitive to a patient’s values and beliefs,” and “…a strong

spiritual belief is needed in order to be able to deal with death and dying.”

“When integrating one’s own set of beliefs and values, along with using the code of ethics, one can enhance the quality of life for individuals, whether it be spiritually, physically or emotionally.”

“It is through a spiritual connection with God that He has chosen me to become a nurse…I am moved by the Holy Spirit and often ask God for help in difficult situations.” “…nursing is also a vocation, a call from God that allows one to widely open her heart to help, support, and comfort the helpless, the sick and the poor.”

“I believe that all human beings are entitled to enjoy optimal health…that we have a right to a feeling of well-being,” and “By acquiring knowledge and developing values about people and their needs, I am able to develop the skills and attitudes I need to give the care my patients deserve.”

Encouraging a philosophy and mission that respects human life and allows an acknowledgement of the presence of God can help us avoid moral disasters.

As prosecutor Whitney R. Harris, writing in Tyranny on Trial: the Evidence at Nuremburg about the slaughter of millions of people considered to be a burden to the state because of race, disabilities or political views, put it: “And so, to the twentieth-century Christian civilization there came these monstrous instruments of extermination.

They were the product of the philosophy of nihilism — of the negation of the worth of the individual — of the denial of the soul — of the rejection of God.” Directing students to develop a values-based philosophy of nursing is an important part of the education of the professional nurse at Emmanuel. We believe that preparing nurses who exemplify good moral values in their professional practices will improve the delivery of health care for all and help make the world a better place now and in the future. S 9

A New Name, an Old Major Fr. Thomas L. Leclerc, M.S., Chair, Theology and Religious Studies

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n June 2010, the College celebrated Sister Janet Eisner’s 30th anniversary as president of Emmanuel College on a warm starlit evening. From the glass pavilion on the quad, the many guests could clearly see the original Marian Hall rebuilt as the remarkable Yawkey Center, the impressive Wilkens Science Center, and the towering Merck laboratories located on the campus, all three major construction projects built during Sr. Janet’s tenure and representing the College’s successful commitment to an exciting future.

Another indication of success is the reestablishment of the religious studies major, a program the College suspended in 1995. A once robust program, the department lacked the faculty to offer the breadth and depth of courses needed for a credible major. In recent years, however, the College has seen its enrollment grow to the current academic year’s all-time high of 1,800 traditional undergraduates and the number of faculty swell to more than 100 full-time members.

By 2007, the religious studies department was able to add three tenure track faculty positions. With sufficient faculty to cover all the major areas of religious studies — scripture, systematic theology, ethics, and comparative theology — new courses were developed to bring greater depth to all areas of the field. The department was now in a position to provide a major in the field. An intensive two-anda-half-year study made it clear the better approach was not to create something new, but to reintroduce the major that had been suspended. In February 2011, the proposal to reinstate the major found favor with the Curriculum Committee and was sent to Sr. Janet. She eagerly approved it.

In the process of preparing the proposal, members of the department 10

appropriated what seems to be something of a tradition in the departmental history: change the name! Since the 1950s the department has see a number of different names: religion, theology, theology and sacred scripture, theology (again), and finally religious studies! After much discussion, we settled on another new name — theology and religious studies — as describing most accurately what we are, in fact, teaching. So, what is the difference between theology and religious studies?

Theology approaches the subject from an inside point of view, i.e., it stands within a particular tradition to study it. It examines a body of beliefs and teachings to determine whether they are reasonable, coherent, comprehensive, and consistent. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the magisterial work by Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), the Summa Theologiae or Compendium of Theology.

This massive five-volume work (never completed) considers the entire sweep of Catholic thought: the existence of God, creation, humanity, human purpose, ethics, Christology, sacraments, ecclesiology and eschatology. A modern example of a wide-ranging theological work would be Karl Rahner’s (1904-1984) 23 volumes entitled Theological Investigations. Both of these works are a systematic examination of Catholic doctrine and teaching seen in their biblical, historical, and religious contexts. Theology also applies its beliefs and teachings to ethical and social situations, and seeks to determine how belief is expressed in action and whether actions are consistent with beliefs.

Religious studies approaches the subject as an object of scientific study, standing outside a religious tradition to examine and describe it. Religious studies utilizes historical, literary, anthropological, cultural and sociological approaches in the study of religion. Its courses examine the phenomenon of religion, which is ubiquitous in human culture, and look for

elements and structures that are common among a number of different traditions, especially Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Students learn to appreciate the social role of religion and its deep roots in the understanding of what it means to be human.

Reestablishing the major, however, is more than a matter of teaching and research in theology and religious studies, and more than a matter of growth in the number of faculty and interested students.

The reestablishment of the major is a bold and public assertion of Emmanuel’s identity as a liberal arts and sciences college shaped by the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. The College is reclaiming Emmanuel’s own history and taking its place in the living tradition of the Church’s long-standing educational mission.

From the founding of the first churchsponsored universities in Bologna and Paris in the late 12th century, theology has held a central place in the higher education curriculum. This is true not only for Catholic colleges and universities but for other denominational institutions as well, as the robust school of theology at Boston University attests. There is an essential connection between the life of the mind and the life of faith. The Roman Catholic tradition has seized on this realization and framed higher education as a dialogue between faith and reason.

Emmanuel’s reestablished majors in theology and religious studies, as well as in philosophy, highlight this distinctive aspect of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition; namely, its insistence on engaging both faith and reason as well as its conviction that the goal of education is the cultivation of the whole person rather than only the development of utilitarian skills. The reestablishment of the major is an assertion and celebration of our proud tradition as a Catholic college and a bold articulation of our commitment to a curriculum that reflects that identity.

Emmanuel College – Newsletter from the Values-Based Education Program

The Philosophy Major is Back!

Thomas Wall, Professor of Philosophy, Chair, Philosophy Department

The study of theology and religion fosters informed global citizenship, deeper social analysis and a more acute moral awareness of the many complex issues that confront us: justice for women, gays, immigrants and minorities; the growing divide between rich and poor; our responsibility for the environment; the implications of globalization and the global economy; dilemmas in medical care; moral uses of military force; and so much more. To be informed and knowledgeable about our world and culture it is crucial to have some awareness of religion and the roles it plays on the world stage.

The Book of Ecclesiastes tells us: “For everything there is a season.” In its seasons, the program in religious studies flourished and then faded. Now is the time for it to come back to life. In doing so, the College celebrates its own history and gives voice to an always firmly held belief that the major in theology and religious studies is an essential part of what it means for Emmanuel College to be “a dynamic learning community rooted in the liberal arts and sciences and shaped by strong ethical values and a Catholic academic tradition.” S With thanks to Susan von Daum Tholl, Sherry Lavalle, and Jon Paul Sydnor for research assistance.

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hen I first joined the Department of Philosophy as a faculty member in 1969, I was pleased to find that philosophy played a significant role in the curriculum and in the lives of our students. Since high schools generally do not offer courses in philosophy, most students arrive at college with no knowledge of what it is. However, at the time, Emmanuel wisely required its students to take two philosophy courses, providing them with the opportunity to discover its intellectual excitement and benefits. As a result, many students chose to become philosophy majors and the department thrived. In the years to follow, however, for several reasons it became necessary to eliminate the major.

Some of these reasons had to do with changes in the curriculum. Chief among these was our shift from a three-creditper-course system to a four-credit system.

This meant that students took fewer courses, which also meant a reduction in the number of required courses. The two philosophy requirements became one. As a result, students had less chance to become familiar with philosophy and less time in their schedules to take philosophy electives.

For the 2011-2012 academic year, I am happy to report that the College has decided to reintroduce the philosophy major. We do so for two reasons. First, philosophy has always played a central role in helping to shape the lives of students in a good liberal arts college. This has been true since Plato’s Academy in ancient Greece, as well as in the grand medieval universities, and continues to remain true today. It is even more the case in a Catholic liberal arts college that cultivates the philosophical mind as a central part of what we aspire to do. If Emmanuel is going to be

counted as an excellent educational institution, and we are, then that big empty place in its curriculum where philosophy used to be, just had to be filled in once again.

The second reason for reintroducing the philosophy major was a resurgence in student demand. As our enrollments have increased, so has the academic quality of our students. Students who arrive at college better prepared academically often are more interested in theoretical disciplines.

Even before the major was reintroduced, we had 10 students who were what we call “individualized majors” in philosophy.

They were, in effect, philosophy majors.

We also have a minor program in philosophy with about 30 students enrolled.

While these numbers are relatively small, they show a trend that we will encourage.

But why should we do this? Why should we encourage a greater role for philosophy in the curriculum and in the lives of our students?

One answer to this question is that philosophy promotes the mission and vision of the College. Some of the goals mentioned in our vision statement include those of encouraging students to become critical thinkers and ethical decision makers. Our mission statement says that an Emmanuel education is rooted in the liberal arts and shaped by strong ethical values and a Catholic academic tradition.

The study of philosophy clearly promotes critical thinking skills. One of the central things philosophers do is examine basic beliefs, beliefs that are usually assumed to be true on the basis of little or no evidence. These “basic” beliefs include such things as the nature of knowledge and reality, about the mind and the self, about the basis of social and political systems, about ethical values and the existence and nature of God — to name a few. To “examine” such controversial beliefs means to consider any evidence that may support or undermine them, and to continued on page 12

Fall 2011

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The Philosophy Major is Back! construct arguments for and against their truth. This is a type of problem-solving activity that requires successful students to gather information, identify and construct possible solutions, examine assumptions, formulate arguments and consider implications of one solution or another being true.

These are the types of skills, among others, that constitute critical thinking.

It should be clear that philosophy also contributes significantly to the development of our students’ ability to make moral decisions. Our many course offerings in ethical theory and applied ethics will attest to that. It is no accident that the editor of this newsletter on values-based education is a philosopher.

That philosophy is rooted in the liberal arts tradition is also true. This is not simply because it always has been. One could argue, for example, that while philosophy may have played a central role in a liberal arts education throughout Western history, it is now science that plays this role and answers philosophy’s central questions.

While the relationship between philosophy and science is too complex to be discussed in this brief article, we can say that the very nature of philosophy lends itself to a cooperative, and not an antithetical relationship with all other disciplines, including the sciences.

This is because philosophy is interdisciplinary by its very nature. Since it examines basic beliefs, and since all disciples have unexamined basic beliefs, there is always a “philosophy of” any field. The importance of this for an Emmanuel education is that philosophy does not only stand alone as one liberal arts discipline among others, but is really “rooted” in all liberal arts and sciences and thus able to consider issues in an interdisciplinary way, a way that promotes reflection on the nature and methods of various modes of knowing. So, for example, there is a course offered at Emmanuel that is team-taught by a philosopher and a biologist that discusses bioethical issues. Each professor brings his own expertise to this cooperative discussion, allowing students to see more clearly not just biological facts and discoveries, but also their implications for

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good or evil. Philosophy needs science for discovering truth about the world; science needs philosophy to help understand the significance of these discoveries.

What remains to be discussed is how philosophy contributes to the Catholic academic tradition. After all, philosophy is not supposed to be any more “Catholic” than math or chemistry, so what can we say about Catholic ideas? I think that philosophy has three roles to play here. First, it can clarify the official teachings of the Church and the ideas of Catholic theologians. What “Catholic” ideas have to say about morality, society or anything else may be tested in the court of reason like any other ideas.

For philosophers, it is not the origin of an idea that is important, but rather its truth or falsity.

Second, philosophers can draw historical connections to demonstrate the perennial influence that some ideas have and continue to have. One of the great philosophical visions embedded in the writings of Aquinas, for example, includes the idea that God created the world according to a plan, a set of eternal ideas located in God’s mind, which served as a blueprint of creation.

Now much of this idea comes right from Plato, even though he would not locate the set of ideas in the mind of God. The third way that philosophers can contribute here is to draw out some of the implications of the philosophical ideas embedded within this tradition. To stay with the idea of Aquinas, for example, we can point out that this is the basis for the confidence present in much of the Catholic academic tradition that there is no conflict between faith and reason. If truths discovered in nature reflect the mind of God, and if those revealed in scripture do the same, then there is no conflict between them that cannot be resolved. There ought to be no fear of science for a believer, for example, since what is discovered can be understood as simply revealing the Truth that is God. Finally, we need to consider an important question: what about our belief that an Emmanuel education prepares students for successful careers? How does an abstract field such as philosophy contribute

to that? I have said much about this in a piece published in an earlier volume of this Newsletter (Fall 2009). I will not repeat what I said there except to say that in addition to being intellectually exciting and a pathway to answering important questions required for personal development, philosophy is excellent preparation for many of today’s most interesting and rewarding careers. Because it develops the thinking skills required for such careers, successful philosophy majors earn higher salaries at mid-career than all but two of the majors offered at Emmanuel. So, because it is intrinsically valuable, and because it plays such a central role in all the areas that the College finds important in an undergraduate education, it gives us great pleasure and excitement to announce that “the philosophy major is back!” S

Emmanuel College – Newsletter from the Values-Based Education Program

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Emmanuel College, founded by the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur in 1919, is a coed, residential, Catholic liberal arts and sciences college located in the heart of the city of Boston.