Secular? yes; humanism? no
a close look at Engelhardt's secular humanist bioethic
pp. 237-258
in: Reading Engelhardt, Berlin, Springer, 1997Abstract
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.
