Concerning Our Measures of the True-Good: What is the Role of Consensus in Bioethics?
Joseph Swindeman, Saint Louis University, Saint Louis, MO

What is the role of consensus in ethical deliberation? Ironically or unfortunately, this question remains one of the most contested issues in bioethics to such an extent that even the conditions for the possibility of consensus have been called into question both metaphysically and morally. First, there are the followers of Thomas Beauchamp and James Childress who firmly believe there is a common morality that constitutes consensus, delimits public discourse, and circumscribes ethical practice. Second, there are the followers of H. T. Engelhardt, who deny the existence of the moral consensus both in fact and principle. When brought into conversation with the role of religion in bioethics, the question of the consensus becomes even more controversial. Some secular ethicists have argued that the moral consensus does exist if we specify that consensus as secular. In response, Christian bioethicists have protested that secular bioethics is meant to include Christians, this claim is false, prima facie. One Christian Ethicist, Kimbel Kornu has argued that to insist on a secular bioethical consensus would establish what Michel Foucault called a Regime of Truth—that is, “that which constrains individuals to [particular] truth acts and establishes their conditions of effectuation and specific effects … [and] determines the obligations of individuals with regard to procedures of manifestation of truth.” If the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities itself assumed the specifically secular consensus as the basis of its educational programs, then ASBH would become the truth regime that orders and constitutes the self of clinical ethicists as professionals. If those professionals are members of religious communities, such an arrangement necessarily implies harming their interior selves by policing the boundaries of their life as professionals. Kornu’s account of the metaphysical harms of a secular Regime of Truth represents a strong argument against the specification of a secular consensus. However, there remains a residue of irony in Kornu’s use of Foucault. As Kornu acknowledges, Foucault argued that Christianity is the clearest historical manifestation of a Regime of Truth. If Foucault is correct, why would a Christian Regime of Truth be any less oppressive than a secular bioethical consensus? Can Kornu’s argument leave any remaining role for any consensus? Sic et Non. As a Catholic theological bioethicist, I must answer that there remains some role for consensus in bioethical deliberation, but which requires philosophical nuance. My paper will answer this question based on a Christian philosophical analysis of the nature of ecclesial faith. To do this, I will investigate Foucault’s concept of the Regime of Truth to demonstrate how fundamentally all Regimes of Truth converge on some activity of communal making or the factum. Then, I will admit that like these Regimes, Christian faith also converges on a factum, but will demonstrate how the faith implies this factum is a different kind. Namely, the Church converges on God’s factum rather than our own, which is only ours through the gift economy of grace. Finally, I will briefly elaborate the how this difference should effect how we engage in bioethical theory and practice.