A House Divided: Coerciveness Within One’s Own Tradition

I. A Source of Political Difference: The Person

My story is about my (unsuccessful) attempt to work for a Catholic university’s department of pediatrics, which hinged on me recanting a publication that supported a particular reading of Catholic clinical ethics. Sounds downright medieval, right?

Political or ideological pressure in academic bioethics exists and can come from many sources. In part this is because bioethics is a derivative discipline. We care about bioethics because we care about the nature of medicine. And medicine can be overtly political, as we have seen in recent pronouncements from professional bodies on subjects ranging from the Affordable Care Act, to conscience protection, to medical marijuana use.

But the medical profession has always had a political aspect to it—sometimes for ill (the historical ban on Black physicians in the American Medical Association), and sometimes for good (current advocacy against torture by the same group). That is a right of the profession. Medical ethics, after all, are practiced by persons who use reason, will, and experience to guide them toward a (negotiated) view of the good. The diversity in the formation of our conscience and our view of the good effects our political motivations, which cannot be divorced from how medicine is rightly (ethically) to be practiced. H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr., one of the most provocative voices in bioethics, famously, rigorously, and perpetually challenges us to ask “Whose ethics?!” and suggests that, in a world of “moral strangers,” the best we can hope for is an accommodation of radically differing views of the good.

Personalists like me—in which the ultimate measure of society is the transcendent human person—agree with Engelhardt that different notions of the right exist, but, personalists being grounded in natural law, also believe that these disparate notions can be ultimately overcome with reason and experience. As Karol Wojtyla has put it, the human person is intimately tied by her very nature to unchanging truth, a truth that is unchanging, but moves us to change.

Thus, despite the sometimes–obvious political bias in academic publishing, most of us still argue and advocate in bioethics not in hopes of mere accommodation, but to persuade. And to do that, the process must at least be fair: the process of academic review and of admission to “open” forums (e.g., teaching institutions and universities) in which ideas are exchanged. In the “marketplace of ideas” there should be no fear, and no coercion. And yet, we all know that there are plenty of both.

II. Tension within Tradition

But what happens if such coercion occurs within your own religious tradition? Although popularly portrayed as monolithic by the media, the Catholic tradition in bioethics has shown a remarkable degree of diversity—from the late Richard McCormick and Edmund Pellegrino, to Kevin FitzGerald and Daniel Sulmasy. It is an “open secret” that Catholic physicians and bioethicists disagree and can learn from that disagreement. The Catholic Medical Association (representing Catholic physicians) and the Catholic Health Association (representing Catholic hospital administration) have clashed on everything from what is “direct abortion,” to the Affordable Care Act.

Full disclosure: I am a member of the Catholic Medical Association and I am a Roman Catholic. I am not ashamed of my Catholicism, and I cannot really deny that I am, as one person who later sought to block my employment put it, “a true believer” in the teachings of the Church. My Catholicism informs and enhances my humanistic pediatric care. A belief in the transcendent motivates me to care for the poor preferentially, as much as it motivates me to see children and their families as vulnerable persons and seek their good. As I write this, I worry openly about this disclosure, since Catholic thought is a pariah in secular academia, and I suspect most readers will have vociferous ideological disagreements with me about many things. But I would hope that such disagreements would not make you less interested in my story; rather, that a firm commitment to fairness would spur you to conduct this thought experiment consisting of two simple questions. First, “What would you have...