Good Without God: Bioethics and the Sacred

Abstract

Bioethics traffics in matters moral. As such, bioethics frequently bumps up against religion, offering an ideal arena to examine how the sacred and the secular encounter each other in modern medicine. In this essay I consider two places where bioethics and religion intersect: 1) the response of bioethics to the universal problem of suffering, and 2) the professional proselytizing or “missionizing work” that bioethics does in order to make a place for itself among the professions of the life sciences.