Abstract
Religious voices were important in the early days of the contemporary field of bioethics but have now become decidedly less prominent. This is unfortunate because religious elements are essential parts of the most foundational aspects of bioethics. The problem is that there is an incommensurability between religious language and languages of public discourse such as the “public reason” of John Rawls. To eliminate what is unique in religious language is to lose something essential. This paper examines the reasons for the marginalization of religion in bioethics, shows the limitations of Rawls’s notion of public reason, and argues for a more robust role for theology in articulating a new language for public discourse in bioethics.
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Acknowledgements
Parts of this paper were presented at the 2009 meeting of the European Society for Philosophy of Medicine and Healthcare in Tübingen, Germany; the 2009 meeting of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities in Washington, D.C.; and at lectures given in November, 2010, at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine in Maywood, Illinois, and the Bill Hanks Center for Catholic Intellectual Heritage at Loyola University Chicago in Chicago, Illinois. The author acknowledges the helpful comments of several audience members.
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Stempsey, W.E. Religion and Bioethics: Can We Talk?. Bioethical Inquiry 8, 339–350 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-011-9323-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-011-9323-1