Bioethics, Suffering, and the Culture Wars

Author:

Imber Jonathan B.1

Affiliation:

1. Department of Sociology, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02481, USA

Abstract

This article provides an analysis of the enduring disagreements among bioethicists over the divide between secular and religious boundaries that are reflected in liberal, libertarian, and conservative approaches to medicine as a profession and vocation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the most authoritative voices to address the problem of suffering were Protestants, Strict Calvinists, hydropaths, and homeopaths. Other religious and medical groups had regularly confronted pain and suffering in the nineteenth century in light of the discovery and increasing use of anesthesia. Rationalizations for suffering were first and foremost indebted to strong beliefs about divine will and about the seemingly inevitable course of nature. Did physical pain reflect the wrongdoing of one individual or of an entire community? What was the appropriate way to respond to the natural circumstances of growth, decay, and healing? Such questions produced a varied rhetoric of suffering that emerged in new ways in the second half of the twentieth century. Questions and concerns about the ethical foundations of medical practice—what should and should not be permitted—illustrate the present cultural struggles.

Publisher

MDPI AG

Reference35 articles.

1. Ayer, Alfred Jules (1952). Language, Truth and Logic, Dover Publications. First published 1946.

2. Bourdieu, Pierre (1993). The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, Stanford University Press.

3. Cadge, Wendy (2013). Paging God: Religion in the Halls of Medicine, University of Chicago Press.

4. Eckenwiler, Lisa A., and Cohn, Felicia G. (2007). The Ethics of Bioethics: Mapping the Moral Landscape, The Johns Hopkins University Press.

5. Holzman, Robert S. (2022). Anesthesia and the Classics: Essays on Avatars of Professional Values, CRC Press.

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