RBWords - Volume 20 - Number 2: February 2007
Something to Think About
r.b.words
volume 20, number 2
February 2007
SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT
The experience of working in and teaching biomedical ethics often gives me something to think about. The textbook that is used in the course here at St. Catharine College is well-known. It is even by authors with a connection to a Catholic university: Georgetown University! Yet the text is resolutely secular even if some of the values and principles would be consistent with Judaeo-Christian moral values and principles. The authors, instead, appeal to a “common morality” – a kind of public consensus – and claim that the four primary principles that they derive from this “common morality” would be accepted by anyone who is “serious” about ethical behavior in health care. Those four principles are “respect for autonomy,” “non-maleficence,” “beneficence,” and “justice.” They even have a nickname in the bioethics world: “the Georgetown Mantra.”
Each of these principles encompasses a world of complex decisions and questions in the field of health care. What concerns me is the fact that this influential textbook (and others like it) seem to believe that religious faith is merely a sort of “patient preference” like a longer straw for the water glass. Of course (they say), religious “preferences” are to be respected but the status of those preferences falls into the realm of private and personal values, not into the vision of the person or the provision of care.
This secularization of health care ethics and indeed of the provision of health care in general takes on frightening implications given the global reach of major pharmaceutical companies with their commercial agendas. It takes on the character of a utilitarian (greatest happiness for the greatest number) rule that results in the greatest profit for the fewest in number. In short, health care is treated as a commodity and the human patient is merely a customer whose needs may well be shaped by clever advertising. Research goes where the money is. Billions for well-known problems. Pennies for the rare ones.
The Catholic Church has been a leader for a long time in health care ethics. This leadership continues in testimony about stem-cell research, assisted suicide, abortion, etc., but government policies are increasingly concentrating on requiring services that violate human dignity and yet are popular because of a secular non-faith oriented market. The voice of faith and human dignity will have to speak louder or else we will discover that Huxley’s BRAVE NEW WORLD has become the present reality and our faith and healing will matter not at all. IT’S SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT.
It Has Been Said
“The challenge to theology is to recover its religiously distinctive prophetic voice and enter into policy debates as an energetic adversary of the liberal consensus. Theologians ought to stick to their own convictions, remain unapologetically theological in orientation, which still seeking common cause and building a common language with all who are similarly committed to health care justice.”
From: THEOLOGICAL BIOETHICS by Lisa Sowle Cahill