Theistic Commitments and Substantive Recommendations in Clinical Ethics Consultation

Recently there has been a substantive debate regarding the role that background religious beliefs should play if a clinical ethics consultant gives substantive ethical recommendations. Some argue that beliefs arising from a religious worldview should not be utilized by clinical ethics consultants when making substantive ethical recommendations. However, the move to quarantine certain sets of background metaphysical, meta-ethical, ethical, and epistemological beliefs from influencing considered ethical judgments raises important questions about what criteria should be used to decide which sets of background beliefs are allowed and which should be set aside. One criterion for deciding whether a set of background beliefs is acceptable when making considered ethical judgments for ethics consultations is whether the set of beliefs can provide an adequate framework to support the rationality of the practice of making substantive ethical claims. That is, do the background beliefs adequately explain and support what we take ourselves to be doing in the practice of giving substantive ethical recommendations? I will argue that the practice of giving substantive ethical recommendations involves making claims about objective moral obligations (i.e., acts that are morally required or morally prohibited), that objective moral obligations have certain characteristic features, and that a Theistic worldview is better able to explain these features than certain non-Theistic worldviews and thus, can adequately explain and support the practice. Thus, this criterion provides us with a reason to allow background beliefs from a Theistic worldview to influence one’s judgments when giving substantive ethical recommendations in ethics consults.