The Emerging Tradition of Secular Bioethics: Giving Moral Guidance in an Age of Pluralism, Postmodernism, and Polarization

Abstract: Secular bioethics has struggled to understand its identity since its inception. Does it just refer to a philosophically neutral proceduralist method for helping individuals answer ethical questions, or can secular bioethicists offer justified moral answers? This panel comprises the co-authors of a forthcoming book that argues secular bioethics in the United States can be characterized as an emerging tradition in which bioethicists are justified in giving moral guidance in clinical, research, and public health contexts.

Speaker one will describe and refute the challenge of postmodern moral skepticism, which claims that no substantive moral claims can be rationally justified in a pluralistic society. Speaker two will draw on Alasdair MacIntyre’s work to argue that secular bioethics is an emerging moral tradition, offering ways to enhance the dominant principlist paradigm of the emerging tradition. Speaker three will describe ways the emerging tradition of secular bioethics should approach contentious moral issues such as abortion, physician-assisted suicide, gender-affirming care, and human enhancement.

The panel will end by reflecting on the advantages of conceiving of secular bioethics as an emerging tradition capable of offering justified moral guidance in a pluralistic society. For instance, at the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, ethicists were asked to help develop crisis standards of care, serve on triage committees, and offer public health policy advice. That bioethicists were able to answer this call with a broad consensus on applicable ethical values and principles evinces the overlapping consensus of an emerging tradition while not requiring unanimity or eschewing any ethical disagreement.

Keywords: Ethics Expertise, Secular Bioethics, Postmodernism