Abstract
Students, teachers and practitioners of the medical humanities examine their collective professional conscience regularly, asking themselves such fundamental questions as: What does the humanist tradition have to offer the 20th- and 21st-century practice of medicine? How is that tradition brought to bear on medicine’s problematic issues? How does biomedical ethics pursued without humanism’s influence differ, if at all, from the medical humanities? Moreover, given the pluralism and fragmentation of today’s postmodern society, how relevant is a tradition built upon the literature, history, and moral philosophy of classical Greece and Rome as augmented by two-and-a-half millennia of scholarship provided mostly by (to use Bernard Knox’s term) “dead white European males”?1 When they converge, these inquiries force those in the medical humanities to ask whether the humanities and humanist tradition make a significant contribution to the study and practice of bioethics, one without which bioethics would be morally impoverished.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Bernard Knox, The Oldest Dead White European Males (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993).
H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. Bioethics and Secular Humanism: The Search for a Common Morality (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1991).
Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 104.
Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 104.
Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 118.
The argument presented here from which Engelhardt draws the conclusion that a bioethic in contemporary pluralist society must be content-less and procedural is a recapitulation and summary of the argument he constructed in 1986 in The Foundations of Bioethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 17–65. The 1986 construction is more painstaking and easier to follow, especially in developing the key notion of mutual respect as the necessary condition for establishing ethics as a means of peaceably negotiating moral disputes. Ethics, for Engelhardt, is an enterprise in conflict resolution, rather than a body of value-based principles.
Peter L. Berger, The Social Reality of Religion (London: Penguin, 1969), 130, cited by Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 4.
Berger, The Social Reality, 130.
Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 108.
Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 18.
See for instance Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), Ernesto Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980), and Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990). The awareness that first truths are not demonstrable by reason but are revealed or apprehended, grasped by “insight” as Grassi puts it, is one hallmark of the path taken by rhetoric in antiquity as it diverged from philosophy. Grassi, whose interest is also humanism, looks to the Renaissance and to Vico’s working out of this matter of first truths. According to Vico by way of Grassi, humanity creates and invents the first connections between itself and its world. The primary apprehending of relationships is not deductive. There are no prior truths or identities from which to infer (Grassi, 8). In Vico’s view, first truths are the products of human ingenium, that is, our capacity for insight and imagination, and truths thus grasped are expressed metaphorically not rationally. Starting in the here-and-now and reasoning backward toward a universally acceptable premise takes the moral investigator just so far. At reason’s deductive limit stand truths that can be known only by way of revelation (e.g., that man was created by God in His image) or discovered through the ingenium of philosophers and scientists of various epistemological traditions (e.g., Plato’s ideal forms, of which each material example is a less-than-perfect imitation or Descartes’ cogito ergo sum). As MacIntyre says in proclaiming the literal “interminability” of present day rival moral arguments, “[f]rom our rival conclusions we can argue back to our rival premises; but when we arrive at our premises argument ceases and the invocation of one premise against another becomes a matter of pure assertion and counter assertion” (MacIntyre, 1981, 8).
Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, xvi. In discussing his three paths-discovery, invention, interpretation-to moral philosophy, Michael Walzer summarizes the rationalist philosophers’ state of affairs using Descartes as example. While Descartes claimed in the Discourse on Method to be undertaking a profound philosophical journey of invention and construction, from scratch, as it were, he in fact “really launched on a journey of discovery,” uncovering and offering as new and proved “facts” of either revelation or common human experience seen with new clarity. Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987), 9.
H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., “Bioethics and the Philosophy of Medicine Reconsidered.” Paper delivered at the Institute for the Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, February 16, 1995.
Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 104. This philosophical position is contested by certain contemporary philosophers. MacIntyre, for example, argues that with functional concepts, e.g., the concept of a watch or of a farmer, value judgment is part and parcel of the factual definition-a watch measures time, a farmer produces crops. Therefore, a watch which does not measure time and a farmer who does not produce crops do not meet the factual requirements of the definition. These examples demonstrate that “any argument which moves from premises which assert that the appropriate criteria are satisfied to a conclusion which asserts’ this is a good such-and-such’ will be a value argument which moves from factual premises to an evaluative conclusion” (55). Charles Taylor, quoting from Bernard Williams, makes the point that there are a host of key value terms, such as courage, brutality, gratitude, which cannot be described without the benefit of normative language. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 54–5; Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985). And a central tenet of pragmatism holds that “knowledge cannot be separated from evaluation; fact cannot be separated from value.” Bruce A. Kimball, “Pragmatism,” in The Condition of American Liberal Education, ed. Robert Orrill (New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1995), 26.
Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 104.
Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 122.
Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 119.
Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 124.
Kurt Baier expresses this idea well by way of explaining Benthamite utilitarianism at the time: “The individual citizen is bound by the law only in the sense that the sanctions attached to it make it prudent but not morally obligatory for him to follow it.” Kurt Baier, “Ethics: Teleological Theories” in Encyclopedia of Bioethics, Vol. 1, ed. Warren T. Reich (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 419–420.
Engelhardt, The Foundations of Bioethics, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 19.
Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 136.
Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 125.
Engelhardt calls humanism “an extraordinarily vague but still fruitful notion,” Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 44.
Passages such as this one suggest the influence of the attack on humanism which flows from Continental phenomenology and is effectively represented today by Gianni Vattimo. The thesis is that a “crisis of humanism” necessarily attends the demise of metaphysics. Vattimo’s line of reasoning in a chapter entitled “Crisis of Humanism” derives much from Nietzsche and Heidegger and hangs on the premise that humanism falsely assumes the centrality of the human subject. See Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 32. Engelhardt refers only briefly to this tradition of the crisis in humanism while devoting almost one-third of his entire discussion to traditional expressions of humanism. I mention this, even though Engelhardt does not, because the change he suggests in the tradition, specifically the de-privileging of human distinctiveness, resembles the “crash diet” for the human subject which Vattimo offers.
John Stephens, The Italian Renaissance: The Origins of Intellectual and Artistic Change before the Renaissance (New York: Longman Inc., 1990), 14.
Paul O. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought (New York: Harper, 1961), 8, cited by Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 48.
Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 43. I follow Engelhardt’s wording very closely throughout these definitions which appear on pages 45–48.
Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 48.
Stephens, The Italian Renaissance, 15.
Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 45.
Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 45.
Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 57.
Taylor, Sources of the Self, 15.
Robert E. Goodin, Political Theory and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 81–94.
Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 56.
Isocrates’ role in establishing the practice and culture of rhetoric in Ancient Greece and the subsequent domination of rhetoric in education are discussed by Farrell and Oakley, respectively. Thomas B. Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 58. Francis Oakley, Community of Learning: The American College and the Liberal Arts Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 50.
This version of Augustine’s accommodation of rhetoric to study of Scripture is from Bruce Kimball, Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education (New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1995), 40–42.
Richard McKeon, “Rhetoric in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 17, no. 1 (January 1942): 6.
Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 87.
Oakley, Community of Learning, 57.
Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 23. The other meanings pertain to: the identification of clerics who are not members of religious orders; the process by which church lands and property becomes the property of the state or the belongings of church clerics become those of secular clerics; “attempts to limit or annul the powers...and influence of the church” (23); and capital S-Secularism as a movement which developed during the nineteenth century aimed at establishing secular societal structures. In this meaning secular takes on a sectarian connotation for the first time. This Secularism intersects with Humanism’s meaning (g) is the form of Secular Humanism, a humanism that embraces a specific creed or set of values. Finally, there is the sense of secular as the “process by which a culture’s or a society’s sense of the religious or the transcendent is transformed into an immanent, worldly province of meaning”(23). This last sense is, Engelhardt says, “complex and controversial” (30). Secularization in this last sense has shaped our civic institutions, including health care. “A well-articulated language of secular moral and legal analysis has developed to serve as the basis for the secular discussions of health and medicine” (31). My point of argument is that Engelhardt’s survey of secularization provides the non-religious moral justification his bioethic employs. Humanism does not contribute to this non-religious moral justification, and Engelhardt does not take from the humanist tradition any of what it would, by definition, add.
Renaissance scholar Paul Oskar Kristeller reasons that humanism is not a philosophy because it embodies no common philosophical doctrine, strictly speaking, except “a belief in the value of man and the humanities and in the revival of ancient learning.” Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Classics and Renaissance Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955), 11.
Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 136.
Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 140. Engelhardt explains this comment in a footnote by saying that the human species is as it is only due to chance mutations, natural catastrophes and the like. Furthermore, given the potential of genetic engineering, species boundaries could become hazy. No characteristics ascribed to humanity by the humanist tradition are, therefore, in any sense necessary.
Knox, White European Males 86–90.
William J. Bennett, To Reclaim a Legacy (Washington, D. C.: National Endowment for the Humanities, 1994), 2. Quoted by Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 75–6. Using Bennett as a defender of this traditional humanism shows just how inclusive this “fruitful notion” is.
Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 59.
Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy, 27.
For information about use of emotion and thinking about emotion in classical Greece, I depend upon Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 46.
Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 45.
Robert E. Proctor points out at length in a scholarly-and moving-way what we can learn about the history and psychology of humankind by comparing the emotional lives of Cicero and Petrarch. Robert E. Procter, Education’s Great Amnesia (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1988), 59–83.
Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 140.
Engelhardt, Bioethics and Secular Humanism, 48.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lagay, F.L. (1997). Secular? Yes; Humanism? No: A Close Look at Engelhardt’s Secular Humanist Bioethic. In: Minogue, B.P., Palmer-Fernández, G., Reagan, J.E. (eds) Reading Engelhardt. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5530-4_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5530-4_15
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-010-6328-9
Online ISBN: 978-94-011-5530-4
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive