Defending and Evolving Secular Bioethics in Response to Religious Critiques

While bioethics had certain religious roots, it ultimately adopted a largely secular discourse. Recent scholarship has renewed efforts to demonstrate that secular bioethical reasoning is not the neutral “view from nowhere” that it purports to be and that religious views are not only wrongly excluded but have something vital to offer. Given the vigor of religious critiques of bioethics and the resurgence of religious influence in political life, this panel defends and refines the value of secular bioethics in response to these challenges. Speaker One will identify characteristic complaints against secular bioethics, for example, that it claims epistemological privilege and that it effectively treats religious perspectives as secondary concerns. Speaker One will affirm the continuing value of conceiving the epistemic framework of bioethics as secular in matters of public reasoning and argue that the burden of proof to integrate religious views as such into bioethics has not been met. Speaker Two will acknowledge that secular bioethical reasoning is not neutral but contains many substantive philosophical commitments that nevertheless satisfy the standard of public reason. Focusing on clinical ethics, Speaker Two will further identify the conditions under which secular and religious voices can engage in meaningful discourse when working to develop bioethical consensus. Speaker Three will affirm the role that religion may play in individual decision making and in institutional commitments but argue that defenders of the inclusion of religious reasoning in bioethics are vulnerable to the same type of critique they make about secular bioethics.