Common Bodies: Pluralism, Embodiment, and Secular Religious Practice at the End of Life
Peter Katz, PhD, MA, FHEA, California Northstate University, Elk Grove, CA
H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. writes that “It is difficult for cosmopolitan ecumenists to understand life within the embrace of traditional communities framed by transcendent commitments or to fathom the gulfs that separate different communities of the ideologically committed” (Engelhardt 1996, ix). This position understands transcendent commitments and authoritative moral consensus as foundations of belief available only to traditional communities.
In response to Engelhardt’s claims about moral strangers, Abram Brummett has made a strong case for secularism as having its own metaphysical interests that can share ground with religion. His work reminds us that emotion and reason are not mutually exclusive, and that “reason” itself can be multifaceted. To accomplish this, Brummett points to a “compatibilist” view of rationality (Brummett 2021, 281) grounded in care and sentiment (Brummett 2022, 60). Pre-theoretical moral intuitions comprise a set of metaphysical commitments that appear in mid-level principles.
This talk addresses the ostensible conflict between religious traditions and secularism in bioethics by building on Brummett and placing embodiment as central to these moral intuitions—both in secularism and in other religious traditions. Secularism is not the antithesis of religion, unable to speak across to the moral strangers of tradition, but is instead a religious practice rooted in embodiment. Rather than understand religion as the product of logic, belief, language, or any purely disembodied trait, this talk draws on the work of Donovan O. Schaefer to understand religion through the study of affect (Schaefer 2015, 2022). Affect here means the embodied, non-conscious feelings that emerge between ourselves and others (and objects) and which act as motive-drives (Schaefer 2019). Here, materialism and affect reframe the definition of moral traditions as a coherent set of beliefs and principles, and instead see them as a way of moving through the world as bodies. The trained emotional habits and habitus of secularism from rationality, to logic, to emphasis on autonomy, are primarily embodied ways of navigating the world. To ground this claim, this talk briefly examines the case study of Advanced Directives and the associated end-of-life care—resuscitation codes, the Honor Walk for donors, etc.—as secular religious practices.
If it is the case that religious traditions share embodiment as the expression of their communal traditions, this talk argues that there is more room for a content-ful ethics of embodiment even when the details of belief between two communities do not necessarily align. Hope and care are not constrained to either shared worldviews or mere procedural ethics; a liberal pluralist healthcare practitioner, ethics consultant, or patient can understand meaning-making as an embodied practice.
In response to Engelhardt’s claims about moral strangers, Abram Brummett has made a strong case for secularism as having its own metaphysical interests that can share ground with religion. His work reminds us that emotion and reason are not mutually exclusive, and that “reason” itself can be multifaceted. To accomplish this, Brummett points to a “compatibilist” view of rationality (Brummett 2021, 281) grounded in care and sentiment (Brummett 2022, 60). Pre-theoretical moral intuitions comprise a set of metaphysical commitments that appear in mid-level principles.
This talk addresses the ostensible conflict between religious traditions and secularism in bioethics by building on Brummett and placing embodiment as central to these moral intuitions—both in secularism and in other religious traditions. Secularism is not the antithesis of religion, unable to speak across to the moral strangers of tradition, but is instead a religious practice rooted in embodiment. Rather than understand religion as the product of logic, belief, language, or any purely disembodied trait, this talk draws on the work of Donovan O. Schaefer to understand religion through the study of affect (Schaefer 2015, 2022). Affect here means the embodied, non-conscious feelings that emerge between ourselves and others (and objects) and which act as motive-drives (Schaefer 2019). Here, materialism and affect reframe the definition of moral traditions as a coherent set of beliefs and principles, and instead see them as a way of moving through the world as bodies. The trained emotional habits and habitus of secularism from rationality, to logic, to emphasis on autonomy, are primarily embodied ways of navigating the world. To ground this claim, this talk briefly examines the case study of Advanced Directives and the associated end-of-life care—resuscitation codes, the Honor Walk for donors, etc.—as secular religious practices.
If it is the case that religious traditions share embodiment as the expression of their communal traditions, this talk argues that there is more room for a content-ful ethics of embodiment even when the details of belief between two communities do not necessarily align. Hope and care are not constrained to either shared worldviews or mere procedural ethics; a liberal pluralist healthcare practitioner, ethics consultant, or patient can understand meaning-making as an embodied practice.