Daniel Callahan, 88, Dies; Bioethics Pioneer Weighed ‘Human Finitude’; The New York Times, July 23, 2019

Katharine Q. Seelye, The New York Times; Daniel Callahan, 88, Dies; Bioethics Pioneer Weighed ‘Human Finitude’

“The scope of his interests was impressively wide, as the Hastings Center said in an appreciation of him, “beginning with Catholic thought and proceeding to the morality of abortion, the nature of the doctor-patient relationship, the promise and peril of new technologies, the scourge of high health care costs, the goals of medicine, the medical and social challenges of aging, dilemmas raised by decision-making near the end of life, and the meaning of death.”...

Among his most important books was “Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society” (1987), which argued for rationing the health care dollars spent on older Americans.”…

“He urged his peers and the public to look beyond narrow issues in law and medicine to broader questions of what it means to live a worthwhile life,” Dr. Appel said by email.”…

While at Harvard, Mr. Callahan became disillusioned with philosophy, finding it irrelevant to the real world. At one point, he wandered over to the Harvard Divinity School to see if theology might suit him better. As he wrote in his memoir, “In Search of the Good: A Life in Bioethics” (2012), he concluded that theologians asked interesting questions but did not work with useful methodologies, and that philosophers had useful methodologies but asked uninteresting questions.”