The papers in this session envision potential futures for bioethics and religion while insisting that the field can remain neither conceptually thin nor politically naïve, especially while operating in a contested moral and conceptual landscape. The authors of the first paper address criticisms of public bioethics as prioritizing autonomy over vulnerability and lived moral experience. They argue that though public bioethics operates within a pluralistic society, the field does not have to abandon acknowledgment of human fragility and relationality. The second author promotes dialogue between psychiatry and theology to craft more robust accounts of moral responsibility and anthropology. Together, these fields can enrich bioethics through more nuanced understandings of agency, virtue, and moral development. Looking to the future of public health and public bioethics, the final author identifies a need for further engagement with neo-conservative Christianity and how theological/political identities now intersect with and shape attitudes toward expertise and authority.
Carter Snead criticizes public bioethics for being based on a thin and therefore problematic anthropology that he calls “expressive individualism.” For Snead, expressive individualism emphasizes individual autonomy as an end-state and ignores other relevant moral concepts, for example, bodily fragility, neediness, and vulnerability. Snead’s criticism implicates an important topic for public bioethics: namely, what kind of anthropology does public bioethics require? This paper responds to Snead.
Since it is concerned with the formation of public policy amidst cultural and religious diversity, public bioethics must remain neutral regarding the final ends that Snead believes must inform a thick and therefore adequate anthropology. This paper argues that a liberal conception of bioethics aims to reconcile respect for diversity with moral judgments about public policy. But reconciling respect for diversity with moral judgments about public policy neither entails individual autonomy as an end-state nor precludes anthropologies that incorporate Snead’s concerns into public bioethics.
Personality disorders occupy a contested space at the intersection of psychiatric science, moral responsibility, and theology. Contemporary psychiatric models describe enduring patterns of cognition, affect, and behaviour that shape relational and social functioning. These conceptions contrast with traditional theological understandings of the human person, which assume moral agency, freedom, and the capacity for virtue. This divergence raises pressing questions: if traits are persistent and resistant to change, how can theology address culpability, sin, and moral formation?
This paper argues that theology must engage psychiatric insights to develop a nuanced account of moral responsibility, recognising the role of psychological constitution and relational context. At the same time, theology offers frameworks for moral progress and sanctification, emphasising incremental transformation, the cultivation of virtue, and the work of grace. By dialoguing with psychiatry, this paper explores how contested understandings of personality illuminate ethical responsibility, pastoral care, and social inclusion.
The future of religion and bioethics is unfortunately a return to the past. Because public health and health policy have become pivotal sites of contestation in the U.S., dominant methods of empirical reasoning and knowledge production are coming into increasingly direct tension with populist anti-intellectualism, distrust of expertise, and conservative theological moral reasoning as seen in the U.S.'s foreign policy decisions (WHO, USAID, Davos). The contemporary entrenchment of neo-conservative Christianity and the Trump administration requires bioethicists to engage conservative Christian ideology if we desire to reclaim the positive efficacy of public health and health policy as measures aimed at improving communal health outcomes. Understanding these organizing logics and their role in this administration’s public health approach helps us better craft new ethical arguments to help others rethink the negative actions against public health within and beyond our borders.