Abstract
Given intractable moral pluralism, what ought one to make of the bioethics that arose in the early 1970s, grounded as it was in the false assumption that there is a common secular morality that secular bioethics ought to apply? It is as if bioethics developed without recognition of the crisis at the heart of secular morality itself. Secular moral rationality cannot of itself provide the foundations to identify a particular morality and its bioethics as canonical. One is not just confronted with intractable moral and bioethical pluralism, but with the absence of a secular ground that can show why one should act morally rather than self-interestedly. The result is not merely the deflation of much of traditional Western morality to life-style and death-style choices, but the threat of deflating to political slogans the now-dominant secular morality, including its affirmation of human autonomy, equality, social justice, and human dignity. All of this invites one critically to reconsider the meaning and force of secular bioethics.
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Notes
As Richard Rorty has observed, "there is no way to step outside the various vocabularies we have employed and find a metavocabulary which somehow takes account of all possible vocabularies, all possible ways of judging and feeling. A historicist and nominalist culture of the sort I envisage would settle instead for narratives which connect the present with the past, on the one hand, and with utopian futures, on the other" [4, p. 16]. Rorty did acknowledge that this involved a momentous change in the significance of morality and human life. "The German idealists, the French revolutionaries, and the Romantic poets had in common a dim sense that human beings whose language changed so that they no longer spoke of themselves as responsible to nonhuman powers would thereby become a new kind of human beings [sic]" [4, p. 7]. Rorty did not sufficiently acknowledge the very dark consequences, appreciated by Dostoevsky, of living after God, many of which were realized by Hitler's National Socialism and the international socialisms of Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot.
It is important to observe that after the publication of A Theory of Justice (1971), Rawls stepped away from interpreting his account as a moral account and instead affirmed it as a political account. He recognized the contingency of secular moral content.
For an account of the quite different role of Christian bioethics, see Engelhardt [8].
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Engelhardt, H.T. Bioethics critically reconsidered: Living after foundations. Theor Med Bioeth 33, 97–105 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-011-9204-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-011-9204-y