The Role of Normative Traditions in Bioethics

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Notes

1. See in particular Walker and Klein (2003). Charles Curran's chapter, in particular, details how “medical ethics was a well-developed subdiscipline of moral theology in the Roman Catholic tradition” by 1966—well before moral philosophy and other disciplines started taking it seriously.

Received secular wisdom often suggests that (explicitly) religious traditions are somehow especially prone to violence and war—and this might be good example of “ideological excess.” But in a recent book that devastates this suggestion, William Cavanaugh (2009) shows how it is historically inaccurate and philosophically imprecise.