McCarthy et al. have made an important contribution to the field of ethics by identifying the important similarities between Christian and secular bioethics that can be drawn on to further s...

“The discipline of theological bioethics is in trouble.” So wrote Charles Camosy in November 2014, claiming that “Today’s centers of power in academic and clinical bioethics (at least in the develo...

McCarthy et al.’s proposal gains much of its plausibility by relying on a superficial treatment of justice, human dignity, sin, and the common good within the Christian tradition. Upon closer inspection of what these terms mean within the context of Christianity, it becomes clear that despite using the same phrases (e.g., a commitment to “protecting vulnerable populations,” the goal of “promoting justice,” etc.) contemporary secular bioethical goals are often deeply at odds with goals of Christian bioethics. So, while the authors (...) are right that there is room for dialogue (and even agreement) concerning general moral principles, the process of specification and application of these principles will often be heavily influenced by competing ethical traditions. Such divergent influences will often frustrate cooperative ventures between secular and religious bioethical projects. Thus, when put into action, McCarthy et al.’s proposal will—at best—produce a divided kingdom; one that cannot hope to stand. (shrink)

Commentary on re-opening dialogue between theological and secular voices in bioethics.

In this issue, McCarthy, Homan and Rozier make the case for re-stablishing the relationship between theological and secular bioethics. I find MHR to be quite...

This article describes and rejects three standard views of reason in secular clinical ethics. The first, instrumental reason view, affirms that reason may be used to draw conceptual distinctions, map moral geography, and identify invalid forms of argumentation, but prohibits recommendations because reason cannot justify any content-full moral or metaphysical commitments. The second, public reason view, affirms instrumental reason, and claims ethicists may make recommendations grounded in the moral and metaphysical commitments of bioethical consensus. The third, comprehensive reason view, also (...) affirms instrumental reason, but encourages ethicists to make recommendations grounded in the moral and metaphysical commitments of their private worldviews. A compatibilist view of public reason is then defended, which holds that each standard view captures an important role for reason in different aspects of secular clinical ethics. The article ends by identifying three implications for enduring theoretical debates in clinical ethics. (shrink)

McCarthy, Homan, and Rozier’s presentation of theological anthropology and its contribution to secular bioethics suffers from three primary limitations. First, the article re...

McCarthy, Homan, and Rozier (2020) state that the Christian bioethical categories, namely sin, human dignity, and the common good, can shed light on bioethical issues, whereas secular bioethics may...

The scope and role of theological bioethics has become a growing controversial topic. For instance, some bioethicists have adopted a strong stance on the meaning of “Christian bioethics,” as not ex...

In this paper, we use an innovative, empirical, and–as yet–rarely applied method in bioethics, namely corpus analysis, which is commonly used in literature studies (Moretti 2013), linguistics (Bake...

For more than 20 years, Western science education has been incorporated into Tibetan Buddhist monastics’ training. In this time, there have been a number of fruitful collaborations between Buddhist monastics and neuroscientists, neurologists, and psychologists. These collaborations are unsurprising given the emphasis on phenomenological exploration of first-person conscious experience in Buddhist contemplative practice and the focus on the mind and consciousness in Buddhist theory. As such, Tibetan monastics may have underappreciated intuitions on the intersection of science, medicine, and ethics. Yet (...) despite their overlapping interests, Buddhist perspectives are largely absent in contemporary neuroethical analysis, apart from conceptual arguments for their relevance. This article attempts to fill this gap by presenting the results of eleven semi-structured interviews with Tibetan Buddhist monastics in India on three issues in neuroethics: identity and authenticity, enhancement, and disorders of consciousness. The results of this empirical study reinforce the conclusions of theoretical work on Buddhism and neuroethics while also identifying future areas of inquiry, including the importance of community, the challenges in acting from compassion, and the value of self-directed mental cultivation. (shrink)

The global landscape in which we wrote this essay has fundamentally changed. Given how these changes have altered the rhythm of life, particularly the added responsibilities that many of you have a...

McCarthy, Homan, and Rozier’s article seeks to bridge a gap between theological and secular bioethics. It should be noted that the “theological” emphasis in the a...

McCarthy, Homan, and Rozier’s call for a renewal of open and honest dialogue between secular and theologically grounded bioethics is admirable. Yet, their essay argues for more than mere dia...

H. Tristram Engelhardt has said that “in the 1960s and 1970s... religious bioethics fell into the shadow of established secular bioethics. I don't think that religious bioethics has ever really...

The declining influence of religious approaches to bioethical issues in academic medical discourse has been increasingly evident over recent decades. Most bioethical scholarship today is dominated...

In “There’s No Harm in Talking,” McCarthy, Homan, and Rozier note that in recent years theological bioethicists have not felt the need to translate their insights for a broader pluralistic a...

McCarthy et al. rightly point out many of the ways in which theological traditions can complement secular bioethics and correct for some of its biases. These predispositions include an overl...

To paraphrase Lewis Carroll’s poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter” from his Through the Looking Glass, “The time has come to talk of many things.” Not as the Walrus did in the nursery rhyme, “of sho...