An Excerpt from “Bioethics after God” by Mark J. Cherry

Medicine and bioethics are going through profound changes in the Western world. Practices that prior generations would have recognized as morally impermissible, such as abortion, eugenics, and euthanasia, are becoming central components of modern health care. In Bioethics after God: Morality, Culture, and Medicine, Mark J. Cherry argues that in the process of rejecting its Christian roots, the Western world has upended traditional understandings of truth that are central to both scientific and moral judgment.

In its rejection of any canonical foundation, the Western world’s postmodern philosophical and theological reflections are profoundly weak—as is its bioethics. Having shed its Western Christian roots and having rejected any other objective and binding reality, secular bioethics is set fully within weak thought. Where the mark of a traditional religious understanding is a discourse regarding one’s obligations to God, including commands regarding duties to self, family, community, and society, the mark of weak thought is all too often the ungrounded attempt to secure a discourse of justice, inclusion, and equity: a project that has failed (Engelhardt 1996; 2000; 2017). Here Rodney Stark’s reflections in The Rise of Christianity regarding how Christianity brought a new sense of the importance and meaning of humanity to the Roman Empire may add some historical context to help illuminate current cultural changes. In a pagan world that glorified cruelty, torture, and death, embraced brothels, sexual promiscuity, and violence, supported abortion and infanticide, while honoring euthanasia, Christianity offered a radically different vision of mercy and love. It “effectively promulgated a moral vision utterly incompatible with the casual cruelty of pagan custom” (Stark 1997, 215). Regardless of its inability to secure a common morality in its rejection of traditional sources of moral norms, secular bioethics has renewed itself as something radically other, returning to a more neo-pagan moral and intellectual culture. This is why it recognizes Traditional Christianity (its knowledge of God, way of life, and moral worldview) as not merely one counterculture among others, but as a rival that is to be discredited and rejected. From the medical gaze that frames the eugenic focus of reproductive autonomy through the political ideology that drives collaboration with a multi-billion-dollar industry to push radical body transformations in various forms, the trivialization of sexual relations (including the development of sex robots), as well as the celebration of euthanasia on demand, contemporary culture appears evermore akin to the rebirth of Neopaganism.

Actions that were once recognized as morally problematic have become so commonplace, as well as commercially valuable and politically desirable, in our modern world as to appear, despite their casual cruelty, as if they were obviously good. To acknowledge such actions as sinful is to reject the dominant secular culture and its demoralized and diminished understanding of human flourishing. For example, Canada’s solution for accommodating the “moral diversity” of physicians who know euthanasia to be murder is to require patient referral to another physician who is willing to engage in the practice. Given such a bureaucratic mindset—if a procedure is legal, physicians must actively assist patients in obtaining it—no one noticed (or cared?) that such “accommodation” is equivalent to requiring physicians to refer patients to the local hitman to be murdered. Evil has become so easily available, bureaucratically encouraged, and banal, to borrow a turn of phrase from Hannah Arendt, that most hardly notice it anymore—many cheer it on!

That the field of bioethics rejects traditional religion is not new. Yet, the dominant bioethical ideologies of the contemporary Western world are not merely secular in the sense of being concerned with the well-being of persons in the present life but are passionately atheistic and unattached from any canonical anchor. They are openly hostile to ethical insights drawn from traditional religion, while also failing to recognize that they have also rejected any ground for their own private accounts of morality. Timothy Murphy, for example, touts the advantages of an irreligious bioethics based on the assumption that the immanent world is all that exists:

This view makes it possible to urge reform and the world toward progress in bioethics in ways not entirely available to religions that hold that the most important justice available to human beings comes only after death. . . . Some religions can therefore exhibit quietism towards social inequalities and the need for reform. (2012, 9)

Similarly, Blackford and Schüklenk (2021) object to Christian bioethicists who utilize what they consider secular concepts, such as “human dignity” or the plight of “vulnerable” persons, in support of religiously based conclusions. They reject religiously based moral and bioethical analysis because it fails to support their own preferred private secular moral preferences.

Such secular preferences, however, are grounded in little more than their own culturally, historically, and politically conditioned interests, reinforced by upbringing, peer group, and the echo chamber among colleagues within their choice of employment. Why, for example, should we believe that social inequalities require reform? Or, that secular bioethics has any particularly useful insight into human dignity or the plight of vulnerable persons? Much more argument is necessary. Equality of what and for whom? What does “human dignity” mean? Who counts as a vulnerable person and why? Are unborn children vulnerable persons? What about prepubescent or adolescent children, who advocates wish to put on puberty blockers or to green light for body modification surgery? Or the elderly and infirm who do not wish to die, but are bureaucratically nudged towards active euthanasia? Claims regarding the importance of social equality assume content-full moral positions that must be proved.

Depending on underlying moral assumptions, secular bioethics might just as well consider equality a vice rather than a virtue. The utilitarian bioethicist, who recognizes equal amounts of the good as equally valuable regardless of whether enjoyed by one person or many people in the aggregate, can justify significant social inequality any time the overall sum of the good is maximized. Inequality is virtuous in a utilitarian sense anytime it maximizes the good. Even moralisms, such as “care for the poor and feed the hungry”, are subject to utilitarian assessment. It is an empirical question whether our usual political tactics for caring for the poor and feeding the hungry do more harm than benefit (see Moyo 2010). Similarly, human dignity and concern for the vulnerable are neither essential nor necessary concerns for bioethicists who assess moral issues through a utilitarian calculus. Without God to provide a canonically binding moral truth any focus on equality, much less concerns for “human dignity” or the “vulnerable”, are no more than free-floating culturally and socially conditioned moral assertions, which can be straightforwardly countered with different free-floating ethical viewpoints.

(excerpted from chapter 6)

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