Post-secular accommodation and Catholic health care: corporate identity and the public good

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the relevance of Jurgen Habermas’ ‘post-secular’ perspective in fostering inclusive conditions for a reasonable accommodation between the secular state and a Catholic facility in the provision of health care. It discusses the ethical merits and contradictions represented by the merger of a public psychiatric hospital with a Catholic rehabilitative hospital. The paper recognizes merits in the Catholic approach to health care, particularly its emphasis on social justice and the common good. However, it argues that from a post-secular perspective, the ‘official’ status given by this merged organization to Catholic healthcare ethics is wrong. That formally identifying the ethical priorities of a publicly funded hospital with a particular belief system limits possibilities for the reasonable accommodation of normative differences. Thus, the paper argues that re-framing Catholic health ethics within a more inclusive, non-denominational, post-secular approach toward the interpretation of health care, more fairly represents the public good.

KEYWORDS:

• Habermas
• Ratzinger
• post-secular
• Catholic healthcare ethics

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Dr Donna Forster and Dr William H. Brown for their suggested revisions and also, colleagues who commented on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Joseph A. Fardella, MA, MSW PhD, is an independent scholar recently retired from 16 years as a social worker at Providence Care: Aging, Mental Health and Rehabilitative Care.

Notes

1 According to Catholic theologian Tracy Rowland (2008, 3), ‘ …  Ratzinger has described himself as a “decided Augustinian” and “to a certain extent a Platonist”’ (from Salt of the Earth: The Church at the end of the Millennium. An Interview with Peter Seewald, San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1996, 33 and 41).

2 Habermas does not explicitly recognize the role of virtue in the process of ethical decision making. Nonetheless, several commentators on Habermas, such as philosophers Seyla Benhabib and Mattias Iser, observe that Habermas’s understanding of deliberative democracy presupposes forms of civic and ‘attitudinal’ virtue. According to Benhabib (1996), Habermas’s notion of deliberative democracy, which seeks to maximize political participation and broaden the process of democratic decision making ‘… is one that Jurgen Habermas’s critical theory shares with the tradition usually referred to as that of republican or civic virtue’ (86). Also, Mattias Iser offers persuasive arguments that moral agents engaged in Habermasian forms of ethical decision making presuppose a virtuous attitude. That social solidarity and deliberative forms of decision-making require agents to engage in cognitive role playing which encourages them to empathetically imagine the experiential contexts which might have shaped the views of other members of the community. Views which may be antithetical to their own. For Iser, the motivation to move inter-subjectively beyond ‘self-preference’ and discursively engage different and/or opposing points of view, with the hope of reaching a consensus, presupposes that the individual’s actions are informed by the virtue of ‘good will’. An empathetic or attitudinal virtue which reflects and guides a moral agents’ larger relational commitment or ‘duty’ to cooperatively determine the public good. Consequently, according to Iser, ‘An inter-subjectively transformed “good will” is thus shown to entail a quasi-transcendental “duty of virtue”’ (2003, 1–2).

3 As previously noted, Seyla Benhabib considers that Habermas’s thinking is part of the tradition of Critical Republicanism or Civic Virtue. Meanwhile, authors Mel Gray and Terence Lovat argue that Habermas’s form of ethical decision making is congruent with a form of communitarian oriented virtue ethics. One which is relevant to professional practice, particularly that of social work. They believe that Habermas’s ethical protocol encourages cooperation in decision making which maximize inter .subjective conditions for the ‘flourishing’ of individuals within the context of particular communities or traditions. And that as such, reflects a form of virtue ethics in the tradition of Alasdair Macintyre. Thus, according to Gray and Lovat (2007, 319),

Herein lies another thread of virtue ethics in Habermasian thought for, as McIntyre (1981) notes, the way in which virtues contribute to human flourishing must be worked in a particular community or tradition, whether that be the professional tradition of social work or of Western democratic societies more broadly.

However, the application of MacIntyre’s version of virtue ethics to Habermas’s view of ethical decision making, particularly as it applies to his view of the post-secular, is problematic. By MacIntyre’s own admission, his thinking is strongly influenced and situated by the Catholic tradition, particularly Thomism. And, in the conclusion of his influential book, ‘After Virtue’, MacIntyre (1981) projects a sceptical view concerning the possibilities for large scale moral renewal in society. Rather, likening contemporary times to a new ‘Dark Ages’, he believes that societies’ hope lies in the construction of new moral communities that will sustain virtue and civility today, as St. Benedict’s monasteries are seen by some, to have done in the past. Thus MacIntyre recommends that ‘We are waiting not for Godot, but for another-doubtless very different-St Benedict’ (McIntyre 1981, 245).

As Michael Driessen observes in the Jesuit journal ‘America’, MacIntyre’s perspective on a ‘different St. Benedict’, can be appropriated from a conservative and separatist perspective. Driessen points to a recent article in the right Christian newspaper, IL Foglio, which responded to the challenge facing Italian Catholics regarding whether to participate in ‘Family Day’ parades, which were organized to protest the teaching of gender theory in Italian schools, and to protest an upcoming vote in their parliament to legalize civil unions. According to Driessen, the paper wondered if it was time for Catholics to adopt the ‘Benedict option’ which, ‘In the present Italian context …  would seem to imply withdrawal from broader public involvement in order to create, in Mr. MacInyre’s words, “new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained”’ (Dreissen 2016, 1).

MacIntyre believes that virtue ethics are relevant to particular moral communities, in his case, Catholicism. In the case of Habermas, because his protocol for decision making assumes that moral agents are shaped by and promote different cultural and traditional views of the good, he aims to provide an ethical frame work within which participants may fairly achieve a consensus regarding how best to represent the common or public good. Consequently, the application of virtue ethics in support of Habermas’s view of the post-secular requires a virtue of tolerance which values the reasonable accommodation of differences. Perhaps Gray and Lovat (2007, 310) provide the necessary caveat when they observe that:

 … like Swanton (2003), we believe the moral climate is changing and the dominant neo-Aritotelian species of virtue ethics where right action is action that would be chosen by a virtuous agent in the interests of human flourishing- the eudemonistic conception of virtue ethics-is changing towards more pluralistic conceptions of virtue ethics.

4 The Peace of Westphalia refers to a treaty signed in 1648 which ended the ‘Thirty Years’ war in Europe between Protestants and Catholics. Among its conditions, was the ability of a Prince to impose his religion on those individuals living in a region subject to his rule.