Nigel Biggar (2015) argues that religion deserves a place in secular medicine. Biggar suggests we abandon the standard rationalistic conception of the secular realm and see it rather as “a forum for the negotiation of rival reasonings”. Religious reasoning is one among a number of ways of thinking that must vie for acceptance. Medical ethics, says Biggar, is characterised by “spiritual and moral mixture and ambiguity”. We acknowledge this uncertainty by recognising rival viewpoints and agreeing to provisional compromises. In this response, I object to Biggar’s characterisation of medical ethics as “morally ambiguous” and “provisional”. I argue that Biggar has failed to provide adequate support for his conception of ethics as a “forum for negotiation and compromise”. I criticise Biggar’s attempt to ‘pluralise’ rationality, and assert that if religion is to play a role in secular medicine, it must be ready to defend itself against a universal standard of reason. In the second section of my response, I argue that ‘theistic natural law’ gives us the resources to defend using reason alone ostensibly faith-based positions in healthcare ethics. In doing so, we retain a univocal conception of rationality, while at the same time leaving space for ‘theism’ in healthcare ethics.

Ethics, Medicine and Public Health , 2018

Medicine now knows how to handle religion in patient care settings thanks to cultural competency. Because of this newfound awareness in medicine, it might seem that medicine has come to tolerate and even celebrate religious pluralism. We argue however that these efforts to tolerate religion in medicine are often based upon mischaracterizations of what religion actually is. Even supposedly tolerant scholars tend to base their tolerance off mischaracterizations of religion. Consequently, medicine's attempts at respecting religion can devolve into a patronizing attitude. Although cultural competency intends to be friendly towards religion , it resembles William Osler's attitude, who argued religion is a danger to medicine. Both cultural competency and Osler imagine religion and medicine as opposites; medicine is rational and objective, religion is irrational and subjective. Even the ''tolerant'' pluralists of cultural competency demand religion serve medicine as an efficient and effective form of biopsychosocial therapy. The only difference is that cultural competency scholars often believe religion can fulfill this goal as an alternative medicine technique or as a psychosocial coping mechanism, while Osler sees no therapeutic value in religion. Imagining religion and medicine like Osler does is a mark of modern secularity's founding myth. We will examine the genealogy of this secular belief and argue that it ultimately originated in propaganda to justify the nation-state's power. We will then briefly sketch a more accurate history to counter this founding secular myth, consequently problematizing Osler's simplistic understanding of the relationship between medicine and religion and challenging how cultural competency imagines religion.

Christian bioethics: Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical Morality

Medicine is always set within particular cultural contexts and human interests. Central aspects of medical practice, such as concepts of health and disease, bioethical judgments, as well as the framing of healthcare policy, always intersect with an overlapping set of culturally situated communities (scientific, moral, religious, and political), each striving to understand as well as to manipulate the world in ways that each finds socially desirable, morally appropriate, aesthetically pleasing, politically useful, or otherwise fitting. Such taken-for-granted background conditions, in turn, impact clinical expectations, understandings of scientific findings, and appreciation of bioethical obligations. As background norms shift, so too do diagnostic categories as alternative modes of classification and treatment prove more useful for achieving socially, culturally, or politically desired outcomes. It is on this point that the essays in this number of Christian Bioethics strike an important chord. As the authors demonstrate, the most fundamental disagreements in bioethics turn on those who seek to frame culture and moral choice around the recognition of God's existence and those committed to recasting all of our social, moral, scientific, and cultural institutions in terms of a foundational atheism. In various ways, each paper illustrates that without canonical grounding in a fully transcendent God, morality-and epistemic claims more generally-are demoralized, deflated, and brought into question. From the religious practices that guide the provision of Catholic health care and the underlying social norms governing psychiatric medical diagnosis, to whether God should be subject to scientific measurement, and the supposed existence of a "common morality," the essays in this number of Christian Bioethics explore the implications of significant cultural changes that have impacted the taken-for-granted norms that undergird medicine and bioethics.

Bioethics

This paper considers what concept of accommodation is necessary to identify and address discrimination, disadvantages and disparities in such a way that the plurality of religious people with their beliefs, values and practices may be justly accommodated in healthcare. It evaluates threats to the possibility of such accommodation pertaining by considering what beliefs and practices might increase the risk of unjust discrimination against and disadvantage for religious people, whether as individuals or as groups; and the risk of disparities between the care provided to religious people. The claim is that there is an important cluster of risks that are political in kind and emergent within philosophical bioethics. While not amounting (yet) to a trend, they are sufficiently threatening to a just civic life for patients and healthcare staff as to warrant scrutiny. After an Introductory Section 1, Section 2 evaluates a criticism of 'accommodation' and the apparently additional health-related requirements that those of religious faith demand, when compared with other people. It does so by comparing Lori Beaman's idea of agonism with that of a distinct and somewhat complementary approach in Jonathan Chaplin's political philosophy, before examining the role of established religion in setting the conditions for the accommodation of religion and belief in healthcare. Section 3 examines risks to such accommodation by engaging critically with three health-related instantiations of political philosophy that differ radically from both Beaman and Chaplin. A concluding Section 4 focusses on appropriate modes of communicating about religious and other beliefs in healthcare.

Health Care Analysis, 2013

For a variety of reasons, religion and faith, with their accompanying beliefs and practices, are once more becoming overtly visible in public life and discourse. Sometimes this increased visibility focuses on problems such as accommodating the needs of groups of service users or staff. Sometimes it ranges round the increased role that religion and faith might have in promoting and providing better health and care services. One thing seems to be clear; religion in all its many forms and manifestations is not something that can be ignored in publicly used and provided health services. It is here, and it is here to stay. In fact, faith and religion never went away. If the blinkers of a certain kind of secularist Enlightenment rationalism are removed, it is clear that religion and faith communities have been integral to the philosophy, formulation, delivery and motivation for providing health care in the West. From the hospices of medieval Europe right up to the hospices inspired by the palliative care movement, religion has been a motivating and sometimes an inhibiting force. It has often been intrinsic not only to institutional and social provision, but also to personal motivation, practice and survival. The health service in most developed nations accommodates a variety of patient beliefs and practices, and draws professionals from an increasingly diverse range of backgrounds. In the contemporary context of enormous religious pluralism in supposedly secular society and liberal, egalitarian health care structures, the time has come to reprise critically the nature, place and actual and potential position and contribution of religion and faith groups in all their aspects. Should religion, for example, be

Health Care Analysis, 2003

For many individuals, religious traditions provide important resources for moral deliberation. While contemporary philosophical approaches in bioethics draw upon secular presumptions, religion continues to play an important role in both personal moral reasoning and public debate. In this analysis, I consider the connections between religious traditions and understandings of morality, medicine, illness, suffering, and the body. The discussion is not intended to provide a theological analysis within the intellectual constraints of a particular religious tradition. Rather, I offer an interpretive analysis of how religious norms often play a role in shaping understandings of morality. While many late 19th and early 20th century social scientists predicted the demise of religion, religious traditions continue to play important roles in the lives of many individuals. Whether bioethicists are sympathetic or skeptical toward the normative claims of particular religious traditions, it is important that bioethicists have an understanding of how religious models of morality, illness, and healing influence deliberations within the health care arena.

Responding to Bronca, T. “A conflict of conscience: What place do physicians’ religious beliefs have in modern medicine.” Canadian Health Care Network, 26 May, 2015.

Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 2014

The history commonly told of the relationship between modern medicine and religion is one of steady, even inevitable, separation rooted in the Enlightenment. The divorce between medicine and religion, it is thought, had become nearly total before a recent surge of interest in the spiritual and religious dimensions of health care. This narrative, however, misjudges a persistent sense of spiritual need in illness that medical practice, even today, is unable to entirely ignore. Relying on primary sources, we recount here the little known story of the rise and fall of the Committee on Medicine and Religion and the Department of Medicine and Religion at the American Medical Association between 1961 and 1974. Arising in a context of a widely perceived dehumanization of care and the emergence of new ethical dilemmas at the bedside—concerns with significant parallels today—the initiative garnered striking physician enthusiasm and achieved dramatic successes nationally before coming to a puzzling end in 1972. We argue that its demise was linked to the AMA’s contentious internal debate on abortion, and conclude with a note of caution regarding the status of normative concerns in medicine’s ongoing efforts to address the spiritual and religious dimensions of its practices.

Journal of Medical Ethics, 1983

Author's abstract health concerns and that transcends both times and cultures.

This paper, offered at the session of the Religions, Medicine, and Healing Group during the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, raises ethical questions about interdisciplinary work between religion and public health. I argue that religious health assets may not always be assets for the health of everyone in the community and that the interests and motivations of public health practitioners may compromise the values of religious communities. While I agree that the important contributions of religious communities to public health must be supported, I also lay out some of the potential challenges to collaboration between religion and public health in this presentation.