Bioethics, the Christian Citizen, and the Pluralist Game

Abstract

The ascendancy of Christian activism in bioethical policy debates has elicited a number of responses by critics of this activism. These critics typically argue that the public square ought to embrace Secular Liberalism (SL), a perspective that its proponents maintain is the most just arrangement in a pluralist society, even though SL places restraints on Christian activists that are not placed on similarly situated citizens who hold more liberal views on bioethical questions. The author critiques three arguments that are offered to defend SL: (1) the golden rule contract argument, (2) the secular reason argument, and (3) the err-on-the-side-of-liberty argument. The author concludes that each of these arguments fail to support SL.

Keywords:

• religion
• pluralism
• liberalism
• secularism

Notes

1. Writes Audi: “The epistemic autonomy of ethics does not imply its disconnection from other conceptual domains, including theology … . I have argued that we can say at least this: God would surely provide a route to moral truth along rational secular paths—as I think Aquinas, for one, believed God had done. Given how the world is—for instance, containing so much evil—it would seem cruel for God to do otherwise. If there were no secular path to moral truth, the plight of the world would be even worse than it is, and in ways there is good reason to think God would not allow” (2000, p. 141).

2. “Philosophical anthropology” deals with questions about the nature of human beings, such as what constitutes a human being, whether human beings have immaterial natures, souls, or minds and/or whether the absence or presence of those attributes or properties determines a human being's status as a moral subject.

3. In the Thomistic tradition some truths of faith may also be truths of reason. As I write elsewhere:

For Aquinas, there are things that can be known by reason, things that can be known by faith, and things that can be known by both or either. For example, the periodic table can be known by reason, the Trinity can be known only by special revelation (faith), and God's existence can be known by reason (the Five Ways) and faith (revelation), though things known by faith alone can never be contrary to reason. There is no two-tier view of knowledge for Aquinas, for objects of faith are truly known and may count against someone's apparent deliverances of “reason,” and it is the job of the philosopher to show that such deliverances are in fact against reason.

The difference between objects of faith and objects of reason for Aquinas is not in their status as objects of knowledge, but in how the knowledge is acquired by the human mind. Take, for example, the case of God's existence and nature. According to Aquinas, one can know through reason that there is an eternally existing necessary and personal agent that is the first cause of all that contingently exists. But that such a being is a Trinity—three persons and one eternal substance—is something revealed in special revelation, Scripture, and is not the result of the deliverances of reason. Still, in rebutting the charge that the Trinity is against reason, the philosopher may offer conceptual clarity to the skeptic and show that the doctrine is not incoherent or irrational. In that sense, the philosopher is showing that that which is known by faith (the Trinity) is not contrary to reason, even as he maintains that God's existence is known by both reason and faith and is thus contrary to neither. (Beckwith, 2004b, pp. 54–55)

4. Although the original purpose of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment was to restrain Congress (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion … .”), the Supreme Court has incorporated the First Amendment through the Fourteenth Amendment and now applies the former to the states as well. See Everson v Board of Education 330 U.S. 1 (1947). (Justices unanimously agreed that the Establishment Clause applies to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment).

5. For a more extensive critique of arguments by Simmons and others, see Beckwith, 2007, chapter 3.