Department of Philosophy, Union College

Chalmers C. Clark, PhD, teaches philosophy at Union College in Schenectady, New York.  His background is in naturalized epistemology and biomedical ethics.  Most recently, his research has been focused on questions of trust in medicne and the professions.  He received his PhD from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), and has been Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Ethics of the American Medical Association; Donaghue Visiting Scholar in Biomedical and Behavioral Research Ethics, at the Bioethics Center of Yale University, and Visiting Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. 

It will be argued that whatever a facial transplant is, it is not the transplantation of someone’s face.  The point will rest largely on a claim that the face, in fact, is not a part of the human body; and thus, not a body part at all.  Transplantation of a kidney or a liver, say, are indeed about body parts.  But if the face is not a part of the body, what is it?  Lady MacBeth points us in the right direction when she said, “Your face, my Thane, is as a book where men may read strange matters.” We might further Lady MacBeth’s point by following Wittgenstein when he said, “The face is the soul of the body.” The idea then will be linked then to Strawson’s concept of reactive attitudes.  The moral of the story will emerge that a whole class of medical interventions generally, such as cloning, test tube babies, and facial transplants, create a sense of “identity shock” as they challenge something crucial about who we are.  Humanists thus have a crucial role to play in anticipating and perhaps softening the shocks we will continue to encounter as medical techhnology forces us, ultimately, to face ourselves.