In Defense of Irreligious Bioethics

Abstract

Some commentators have criticized bioethics as failing to engage religion both as a matter of theory and practice. Bioethics should work toward understanding the influence of religion as it represents people's beliefs and practices, but bioethics should nevertheless observe limits in regard to religion as it does its normative work. Irreligious skepticism toward religious views about health, healthcare practices and institutions, and responses to biomedical innovations can yield important benefits to the field. Irreligious skepticism makes it possible to raise questions that otherwise go unasked and to protect against the overreach of religion. In this sense, bioethics needs a vigorous irreligious outlook every bit as much as it needs descriptive understandings of religion.

Keywords:

• atheism
• agnosticism
• bioethics
• ethics
• irreligion
• religion
• theism

Notes

Sulmasy (2009) puts many of the items that these commentators fold into religion under the umbrella of spirituality. That makes better sense to me, since it is possible to be oriented to all these issues without the assumption or belief in any kind of transcendent reality.

I use term “secular” to signify morality “based solely on regard to the well-being of mankind in the present life, to the exclusion of all considerations drawn from the belief in God or in a future state” (Simpson and Weiner 1989, XIV, 849).

Both searches carried out June 1, 2011.