When you talk about end-of-life issues, according to Gundersen Lutheran Health System’s director of clinical ethics, “you’re really talking about the meaning of life, about your religious beliefs and faith, and ultimately about who you are.”

Advance directives respect familial relationships, spiritual values, and individual choices, says the president of the National Association of Evangelicals.

“If we can bring in some light, the darkness will not overcome the light, and that’s where faith is. We believe that,” says Lyn Lusi, who has spent her professional life in medical care for the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

"Computers will match us in emotional intelligence, which includes our whole moral system," says inventor and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil.

Biological and technological evolution "is a spiritual process," says this famous futurist. "Entities become more godlike, never reaching that ideal but moving in that direction exponentially."

Purposefulness and self-sacrifice in human life "can never be reduced to a machine," according to this bioethicist.

"The whole system is greased to pay hospitals and others for expensive things people might not even want” at the end of life, says Dr. Lachlan Forrow, director of ethics and palliative care at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital.

“It’s impossible not to ration, it’s irrational not to ration, and it’s unethical not to ration” medical care at the end of life, says this Harvard Medical School ethics professor.

Clinics in India pay poor women a lot of money to be surrogate mothers, but "the contracts are usually written to protect the wealthy people who are commissioning the baby," says ethicist Arthur Caplan.

“We’ve been Muslims for 1400 years,” says Abdul Sattar Edhi, a one-man charity who runs a Karachi ambulance service and whose wife oversees shelters and orphanages for women and children. “Why don’t we become human beings? God doesn’t just love Muslims. He loves human beings.”