Religion and the Secularization of Bioethics

The occasion of this special supplement on religion and bioethics serves to remind me, once again, that the field of bioethics as we now know it is a creature of its time and history. It grew up during the 1960s and 1970s in an era of affluence and social utopianism, in a culture that was experimenting with an expansive array of newly found rights and unprecedented opportunities for personal freedom, and in the context of a national history that has long struggled to find the right place for religion in its public life. For medicine it was a time that combined magnificent theoretical and clinical achievements with uncommonly difficult moral problems, many of them bearing on the self-identity and goals of medicine. The story of contemporary bioethics turns on the way in which those problems intersected with, and whose understanding was shaped by, that larger temporal and social context. The most striking change over the past two decades or so has been the secularization of bioethics. The field has moved from one dominated by religious and medical traditions to one now increasingly shaped by philosophical and legal concepts. The consequence has been a mode of public discourse that emphasizes secular themes: universal rights, individual self-direction, procedural justice, and a systematic denial of either a common good or a transcendent individual good. Let me, if I may, use myself as an illustration of this trend, as well as an example of some considerable uneasiness left in its wake. When I first became interested in bioethics in the mid-1960s, the only resources were theological or those drawn from within the traditions of medicine, themselves heavily shaped by religion. one way, that situation was congenial enough. I was through much of the 1960s a religious person and had no trouble bringing that perspective to bear on the newly emergent issues of bioethics. But that was not to be finally adequate for me. Two personal items were crucial. My religious belief was by then beginning to decline, and by the end of the decade had all but disappeared. My academic training, moreover, was that of analytic philosophy, and I wanted to bring that work to bear on bioethics. Was it not obvious, I thought, that moral philosophy, with its historical dedication to finding a rational foundation for ethics, was well suited to biomedical ethics, particularly in a pluralistic society? Just as I had found I did not need religion for my personal life, why should biomedicine need it for its collective moral life? The answer to that last question has been less obvious than I originally thought. If my life has been, in a way, relieved by the absence of religion as a guiding force, I cannot say that it has been enriched or that I am a better person for that, Nor can it be said, I think, that biomedical ethics is demonstrably more robust and satisfying as a result of its abandonment of religion. To say that of course is not to make a case for the validity of religion, which must be made on its own merits, not on its potential contribution to bioethics. Some nineteenth century thinkers, we might recall, came to think that, although religion was false as a way of understanding the world, it was socially useful to sustain as a source of discipline and political stability. There was always something slightly cynical in that view, and doubly so because it was meant to strengthen the hand of those in authority. Nonetheless, it is not necessary to entertain such a position to recognize that, whatever the ultimate truth status of religious perspectives, they have provided a way of looking at the world and understanding one's own life that has a fecundity and uniqueness not matched by philosophy, law, or political theory. Those of us who have lost our religious faith may be glad that we have discovered what we take to be the reality of things, but we can still recognize that we have also lost something of great value as well: the faith, vision, insights, and experience of whole peoples and traditions who, no less than we unbelievers, struggled to make sense of things. …