This book advocates a substantive common ground in global bioethics. It starts from an Orthodox Christian anthropology to highlight the relationship between hospitality, dignity, and vulnerability as the meeting point between strangers, regardless of their value system. The universal experience of suffering and death is the unifying starting point of that anthropology. Therefore, in medicine, where physicians and patients meet as utter strangers, not only as moral strangers, hospitality highlights the human dignity and vulnerability of both parties and establishes gratitude, compassion, and solidarity as the constructive building blocks of a healing practice of medicine and a humane medical system, locally and globally.
This book advocates a substantive common ground in global bioethics. It starts from an Orthodox Christian anthropology to highlight the relationship between hospitality, dignity, and vulnerability as the meeting point between strangers, regardless of their value system. The universal experience of suffering and death is the unifying starting point of that anthropology. Therefore, in medicine, where physicians and patients meet as utter strangers, not only as moral strangers, hospitality highlights the human dignity and vulnerability of both parties and establishes gratitude, compassion, and solidarity as the constructive building blocks of a healing practice of medicine and a humane medical system, locally and globally.