Bioethics as a Liberal Roman Catholic Heresy: Critical Reflections on the Founding of Bioethics

Abstract

Bioethics emerged to fill the moral vacuum in health care policy created by (1) a deflation of medicine as a guild with the consequent marginalization of professional medical ethics and of physician medical ethics experts, (2) the secularization of American society with the subsequent cultural discounting of medical moral theology and medical moral theologians, along with (3) the emergence of a general hermeneutic of suspicion directed towards traditional cultural authorities. The cardinal contributions made to the emergence of bioethics by Roman Catholic moral theological and moral philosophical assumptions, as well as by the cultural consequences of the Second Vatican Council, have been underappreciated. The moral theological and moral philosophical assumptions of Roman Catholicism made it plausible for the Roman Catholic founders of bioethics to hold that humans share a common morality, and that moral philosophers are capable of disclosing its character on analogy with the contemporary Roman Catholic understanding of natural law. Also, in the wake of the theological and spiritual disorientation precipitated by the Council, many Roman Catholic clerics emerged as dissidents who regarded bioethics as having the capacity to reorient moral reflection and redirect society. More broadly, many of the founders of bioethics who had substantive intellectual roots in theology and the ministry concurred with this Roman Catholic view that there was one common human morality and that there would be one common bioethics. Bioethics emerged as an intellectual offspring spawned from a very particular tradition of moral-theological assumptions, as well as commitments to late-Enlightenment aspirations for moral philosophy that engendered bioethics, encouraged in great measure by the displaced post-religious passions of the formerly religious.