The pretense that it is stacks the deck in favor of a secular hegemony over our public health policies.

Public-advocacy-focused secular bioethics is largely progressive politics covered with a veneer of expertise. While there are certainly university courses and degrees in the field, no bioethicist is licensed as such. Indeed, the entire discourse is purely subjective. It is driven mostly by philosophers, professors, doctors, and lawyers who opine about a particular set of issues, your faithful correspondent included.

But now, members of the tribe apparently want to pretend that secular bioethics has become such a deeply ingrained part of our societal bedrock that it qualifies as a moral tradition. From, “Bioethics as an Emerging Moral Tradition and Some Implications for Adversarial Cooperation,” published in the influential Journal of Medical Ethics (citations omitted):

In a forthcoming book titled The Emerging Tradition of Secular Bioethics, . . . we focus on whether the field of bioethics in the pluralistic and increasingly polarised American context can give justified moral guidance in foundational, clinical, research and public health domains. We argue against a proceduralistic account of bioethics that limits the field to analysing moral problems and clarifying key concepts but never offering substantive moral guidance. We also reject an Enlightenment account of bioethics based on universal, neutral and abstract rational standards and moral first principles that are undeniable by any reasonable person and that can (in theory) eliminate all fundamental moral disagreements. Rather, we argue that while once naming a discourse through which various historically embedded moral traditions could discuss ethical challenges, bioethics is now an emerging content-full moral tradition in its own right.

Notice that the entire premise excludes the moral influence of religion — which is a much deeper tradition with a far longer history — even though one of the founding fathers of bioethics was the great Christian theologian Paul Ramsey. Moreover, some of the most vibrant minds arguing against contemporary mainstream views — such as the astute Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy (among many others) — would seem, by definition, to be excluded from the supposed “moral tradition” because their principles are profoundly influenced by faith. (For those who would applaud, please recall that eugenics was a progressive secular policy resisted most vociferously by the Catholic Church.)

I have long believed that secular bioethics has become an orthodoxy. The authors seem to agree:

To be a bioethicist is to be a member of a moral tradition — a community of inquirers that shares beliefs, practices, history, narrative and canonical texts.

Does that mean that fundamental disagreement is equivalent to a heresy? The authors say no, that disagreement is part of the moral tradition. Really? Funny, when Leon Kass was chosen by President George W. Bush to lead the President’s Council on Bioethics, many mainstream voices in the field threw a fit — because Kass believes in intrinsic human dignity, one even compared him to a fictional movie assassin. The great work of the council was — and still is — mostly shunned by those who would claim to lead the “moral tradition.”

Here’s what I think is really going on. The moral tradition pretense is a way of stacking the deck. The authors even give an example of a supposed “consensus” involving medical conscience:

A pertinent example is the ‘compromise view’ approach to managing clinical encounters where a patient requests a medical good or service that conflicts with the clinician’s core moral values. Compromise views combine the time-honoured, cross-cultural ideal of respecting individuals’ moral values with the notion of public reason to support a limited right to conscientious objection — a concept adapted for medicine from military contexts.

Such a compromise involves allowing professionals to conscientiously refuse to provide certain services they deem immoral, while requiring them to provide complete and accurate information on the availability of such services to their patients, referral to another provider willing to provide such services, and the provision of such services in emergency situations when no other provider is available.

Sorry. Debate over medical conscience continues. The alleged “consensus” is really just bioethicists who already agree with each other reaching an “agreement” to force heterodox professionals to comply with acts these heterodox professionals consider to be morally abhorrent.

Here’s an example. In Ontario, Canada, a doctor who is asked to administer a lethal jab by a legally qualified patient must be complicit in taking innocent human life — either by killing the person or making an “effective referral,” i.e., procuring a doctor who is known to be willing to euthanize — or risk professional discipline. Talk about a “heads we win, tails you lose” consensus that can drive Hippocratic physicians out of the profession and keep very qualified young people who would make great doctors from going to medical school at all. Of course, that is the point of the “compromise.”

Bioethics as a “moral tradition” would be a means of imposing secular hegemony over our public health policies, medical ethics, and patient choices. That won’t happen if we always remember that the so-called tradition is, in reality, just opinion. Whether practitioners reach some sort of consensus with each other about contentious bioethical issues should not determine public policy nor be controlling on those who disagree.