HRC Summer Studentship 2005/6
Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge the funding of the Health Research Council for this study. I wish to thank my supervisor Prof Grant Gillett for his encouragement and guidance. I also thank colleagues at the Bioethics Centre at the University of Otago for accommodating me during this study.
Introduction
This essay focuses on some curious aspects of the relationship of society to religion, particularly in bioethics. My first observation is that the origins of bioethics lie largely in theology.[1] The second is that sociologists of religion are reporting that spirituality is making a comeback into people’s lives. In spite of this, spirituality and theology often finds itself shut out of public decisions in bioethics. In secular liberal democratic societies, in particular, the place of spirituality is not altogether unproblematic when it comes to public bioethical decision making.
This paper examines a strain of modern political philosophy that suggests that religion be kept out of public policy-making. In this view it is somewhat paradoxical that in New Zealand spirituality is formally given a space for input into bioethics, with flow on effects for health research. The question of how this may be compatible with our secular liberal democracy will be examined. I will argue that in practice New Zealand society operates an informal system of thin liberal multiculturalism that can accommodate spiritual and cultural concerns without threatening its liberal democracy.
The Return of Spirituality
Spirituality is making a comeback in people’s personal lives. This has proved surprising to secularisation theorists, who thought that religion was dying out.[2] New age forms of individualistic spirituality are not the only expressions of spirituality to see resurgence. Christian and Islamic political movements are also expressing themselves publicly in new and forceful ways. In New Zealand bioethics and health research the spiritual voice is being accommodated in high level decision-making through the government-funded Toi Te Taiao: The Bioethics Council. Established following the recommendation of the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification held in 2000 and 2001, the mandate of the Council is consider the Spiritual, Ethical and Cultural aspects of new biotechnologies. In large part the Bioethics Council considers these matters as an expression of the government’s commitments to Maori, who do not consider the separation of spiritual, culture and ethical as acceptable. Yet the Bioethics Council can hear all New Zealanders’ spiritual concerns about emerging biotechnologies. Nevertheless given that New Zealand is a secular liberal democracy this consideration of spirituality in public decision-making is not straightforward.
Bioethics in a Liberal Society
In making law and setting public policy the government and its agencies are expected to give secular reasons for what they do. New Zealand does not have an established church and could be described as maintaining a separation of church and state. [3] Materially this form of society has specific outcomes for bioethical discussion, as Max Charlesworth describes:
In such a society there cannot be any consensus on second-order or ‘partisan’ or confessional values, for example that heterosexual and monogamous marriage is (as Christians would want to hold) the ethically preferred way of family formation, or that deliberately ending one’s life is (as orthodox Jews would want to maintain) against God’s will; or that organ transplants violate the integrity of the body and spirit (as Buddhists believe); or more controversially, that abortion is equivalent to murder of the innocent (as many Christians hold).[4]
Despite this lack of consensus there is a need to legislate and develop policies on these and other bioethical matters. A problem, therefore, for liberal societies is to accommodate a diversity of views in making law, while preserving the unity of their society. This raises questions over the formal participation of religion in the making of policy on matters considered by the Bioethics Council.
Liberal Agenda-Setting
In his seminal article, ‘Theology Confronts Technology and the Life Sciences,’ theologian James Gustafson writes of the problems theology may have in participating in discussions whose parameters may have already delimited the opportunity for theology to play a role:
Not only is the audience frequently uninterested in the theological principles that might inform moral critique, but also the problems that are addressed are defined by the non-theologians, and usually are problems that emerge within a very confined set of circumstances … Obviously it is not easy to give a clearly theological answer to a question that is formulated so that there are no theological aspects to it. To make the practical moral question susceptible to any recognizably theological answer requires nursing, massaging, altering, and maybe even transforming processes, [sic] When these processes are completed one might discover that a different set of issues are under discussion from those that originated the discussion.[5]
That formal public questions in a secular liberal society are likely to exclude the theological should not be surprising. This may happen in the presence and wording of specific questions for which opinions are being sought, or at a higher level in the naming and framing of the very issue itself. But it is not only the questions and their framing that may hinder the theological voice from being heard in its theological formulation. The form of acceptable answers to such questions may also be prescribed or delimited, at worst to a yes/no dichotomy on a biased question. But even where questions are open and answers can be fleshed out, some contemporary liberal political philosophers say that input into such deliberations must take the form of secular speech.
There is a prominent strain of thought that in a secular liberal democracy religious reasons cannot be determinative in policy making and in the making and justification of public decisions, including those relating to publicly funded research. One leading advocate of this position is Robert Audi. He puts the onus on individuals and groups to avoid using purely religious arguments in public discourse where the policies advocated would restrict the liberty of others. Audi uses two tenets to describe his position. The first is “the principle of secular rationale”, whereby “one has a prima facie obligation not to advocate or support any law or policy that restricts human conduct unless one has and is willing to offer, adequate secular reason for this advocacy or support.”[6] Second he proposes a “principle of secular motivation,” in which ones advocacy must be sufficiently motivated by secular reasons.[7] While the onus here is on participants in a political process, the relevance to bioethical discussion is that the government specifically wants to hear non-secular views, presumably from people motivated by their religious and cultural values.
For New Zealanders the arguments of these liberals remain in the realm of theory. There is no formal requirement that New Zealanders use secular language when addressing policy and lawmakers. Churches can decide for themselves which language they use; theological or secular. In practice churches that do speak in public deliberations often freely adopt the language of liberalism deliberatively.[8] This may be for pragmatic reasons; deliberately communicating their position in secular terms believing that this will have greater influence. But I suspect that on many social issues, including many bioethical ones, the church has no other language at its disposal than the predominant liberal one. This may be for two reasons. Firstly, that the discussion, as Gustafason suggests, is cast in secular liberal framework, leaving little room for other languages to enter in. It is also probable that the power of liberalism has assimilated the churches and they have forgotten their native way of understanding themselves and the world.[9]
Spiritual Particularity
The liberal context of bioethical discussion provides several reasons for the exclusion of the spiritual. This is not simply because the separation of church and state, which is also justified on liberal grounds. Another reason is that modernist societies struggle to accommodate the particularity of ethnic and religious minorities. In liberal worldview there is no Maori science, feminist epistemology, nor Christian ethics.[10] Ironically, given the failure of these particular worldviews to win widespread acceptance, there is in liberal society a commitment to universal truth, reason and ethics. Such a universalistic approach creates a situation whereby all peoples can be understood to fit within a common worldview. As I will show this attempted universalism is at the root of our functional multiculturalism.
In addition to ethnic and cultural groups, religious communities also sustain ways of knowing, moral frameworks and practices. All these groups could be classified as cultures or traditional communities. What they have in common is their non-liberal character, a unique world-view and a way of understanding the individual in relation to community that is different to liberalism. It is this consideration of religion as culture that informs the following analysis of the multicultural nature of our polity.
Multiculturalism and Spiritual Input
Viewing Maori, Jews, and Christians (to mention only some examples) as members of cultures, each with their own spirituality, attitudes and ethical concerns (however much these may overlap) it can be argued that New Zealand’s socio-political way of life is multicultural, where a plurality of voices can be heard. But what sort of multiculturalism do we have? How equal are these cultures and what is the basis of interaction between them? This discussion in New Zealand cannot be divorced from the controversial subject of biculturalism. While multiculturalism can mask the special place of Maori in a bicultural society, biculturalism can mask the multitudinous aspect to non-Maori culture.[11] But my questions regarding multiculturalism are not merely focussed on the existence of other ethnic groups (such as Samoans or Chinese) but the existence of other ways of understanding the world we live in.
In speaking of multiculturalism, which can include two or more cultures, I will adapt the types of multiculturalisms described by Yael Tamir as ‘thin’ and ‘thick’:
The first is a thin one which involves different liberal cultures; the second, thick multiculturalism, involves liberal as well as illiberal cultures. The former leads to a particular type of interest-group politics, the latter to a modus vivendi which is based on two, very different points of view: a liberal one which emphasises respect for different ways of life, and an illiberal one which seeks to secure its own existence in the midst of a liberal society.[12]
Applied to religious groups we can describe them as thins and thicks. The thins are the religious liberals who want to uphold liberalism, promote human rights, democracy, tolerance and autonomy. The thicks are sceptical of these things and are not committed to democracy nor human rights. They are more likely to be orthodox, conservative or illiberal. Both religious groupings exist in New Zealand and liberal societies around the world.
Thin multiculturalism is where the participants basically subscribe to liberal assumptions, couching their input into the policy debates in liberal terms. This can also be described as interest group politics. This form of thin multiculturalism exists within a procedural liberalism whereby the rules of the
game are agreed to and followed by all participants. Max Charlesworth, writing on religion, sees faiths behaving in the following way in such a society:
But in a liberal ethically pluralist society none of them has a right to ask the state to intervene in matters within the sphere of private morality. They may, as Mill says, remonstrate and argue with each other and the rest of society, and attempt to persuade them, but they may not invoke the law to recognise and officially endorse their view as against other views.[13]
Thick multiculturalism, on the other hand, features a more fundamental clash of values. Maori and orthodox Christian worldviews are, for example, at odds with liberalism. They both differ over the primacy of the individual, the focus on autonomy and other central liberal assumptions. Hence thick multiculturalism applies to a clash of worldviews that cannot be accommodated within a liberal paradigm. This is often cast in view of liberal versus illiberal perspectives, with the illiberal being seen as anti-liberal and anti-democracy. Aside from religion, the most important thick multicultural debates in New Zealand are between Maori and the dominant Pakeha culture. Concepts important to Maori in ordering and describing life, such as whakapapa, mauri, tapu, noa and so on, have little traction in secular New Zealand, despite the so-called Maori
renaissance of recent years. Maori ways of life are thick in the way that Maori have a different culture and world-view and one that provides a far-reaching challenge to liberal society.
Thin multiculturalism poses few risks to liberal society, since debates between cultures are intra-liberal.[14] This means that debates are held within a liberal worldview, using liberal terms. Questions of the separation of religion from politics are hardly pressing where the religions are liberal and support the basis of the democratic society. The conclusion to draw from this is that within thin multiculturalism religious input is not problematic, since it is filtered through liberal ideology. Issues are framed in liberal ways, debated and reported in liberal terms, with results that inform liberal law making.
Ironically this assimilation into liberalism may diminish its value. The more liberals wish to hear from spiritual groups, the more these groups may speak like liberals. Those religiously-committed persons and groups who are willing to translate their ethics into this dominant thinking may have more success in influencing decisions. But there is a risk that in such a translation their beliefs may transmute and so the input is altered from what is really trying to be communicated. Such issues are relevant in a democracy where all citizens are able to have their say and should be able to speak on their own terms.
What Power does the Bioethics Council have Anyway?
There is another reason why the spiritual work of the Bioethics Council is unproblematic, and that is its place in the policy-making process. The Council considers new technologies in dialogue with organisations and other parties with an interest in biotechnology. The only powers it has are to report its work and make recommendations to government, which ultimately makes legislation and policy. This legislative process is also open to input, but this formal process of making legislation is even more secular and quite separate from the church or the influence of Maori spirituality, being conducted on purely political terms. Here ultimately liberal values will predominate. That is not to say that spiritual values and theology can have no influence at all, just that it is unlikely that the influence will be in the form of spiritual and theology. The influence of the churches is most likely to be in the form of support for human rights and other liberal notions. In a liberal democracy such as New Zealand, public policy must be justified on secular grounds.
Conclusion
The apparent paradox of the New Zealand government, which is secular, liberal and democratic, encouraging, facilitating and promoting the spiritual views of New Zealanders to be heard in debate over biotechnology, does not pose the problems that some political philosophers fear. This is because New Zealand operates on a thin multicultural basis whereby the concerns of Maori and Christian alike can be heard, but will ultimately be accommodated, if at all, within a liberally based policy that can satisfy the secularity of the state. This is likely to occur whether or not these cultures adopt public reason and secular speech in place of their own native languages. There is, therefore, a bias built into the decision-making process that all ethical input has to pass through various filters - such as rationality, evidence based and secular. Such a framework, if it exists, will produce a bias against ethical input in certain format or from particular world-views. Public decision-making that sets the parameters for health research and the use of biotechnology is likely to favour religious input translated into the dominant ethical paradigm of liberalism.
Endnotes
- Martin E. Marty, 'Religion, Theology, Church, and Bioethics,' The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 17 (1992)., David H. Smith, 'Religion and the Roots of the Bioethics Revival,' Religion and Medical Ethics: Looking Back, Looking Forward, ed. Allen Verhey (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1996)., Carla M. Messikomer, Renée C. Fox and Judith P. Swazey, 'The Presence and Influence of Religion in American Bioethics,' Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 44.4 (2001).
- For a discussion of this see David Tacey, The Spirituality Revolution: The Emergence of Contemporary Spirituality (Sydney: Harper Collins, 2003).
- This perspective is discussed in Rex J. Ahdar, Worlds Colliding: Conservative Christians and the Law (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2001). See especially chapter one pages 9-18.
- M. J. Charlesworth, Bioethics in a Liberal Society (Cambridge England Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 163.
- James A. Gustafson, 'Theology Confronts Technology and the Life Sciences,' Commonweal 105.12 (1978): 387.
- Robert Audi, 'The Place of Religious Argument in a Free and Democratic Society,' San Diego Law Review 30 (1993): 691-92. Similarly John Rawls is a political philosopher who advocates “public reason.”
- See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Audi, 'The Place of Religious Argument in a Free and Democratic Society,' 692.
- Michael E. Bailey, 'The Wisdom of Serpents: Why Religious Groups Use Secular Language,' Journal of Church and State 44.2 (2002).
- On the question of translation of views from one tradition to another and its implications see chapter 19 of Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988). Some theologians even dispute the notions of a peculiarly Christian ethic.
- SeeAndrew Dutney, Playing God: Ethics and Faith (Melbourne: HarperCollinsReligious,2001), xi. Also the discussion at H. Tristram Jr. Engelhardt, The Foundations of Christian Bioethics (Exton PA: Swets & Zeitlinger Publishers, 2000), 14-16.
- See Richard Mulgan, Maori, Pakeha and Democracy (Auckland N.Z.: Oxford University Press, 1989), 7-10.
- Yael Tamir, 'Two Concepts of Multiculturalism,' Journal of Philosophy of Education 29.2 (1995): 161.
- Charlesworth, Bioethics in a Liberal Society, 45.
- Tamir, 'Two Concepts of Multiculturalism,' 161.