Medicine, Race, and Persons: How the Imago Dei and Philosophy of Race Can Open Our Eyes to the Racialized
Jonathan Avendaño, MDiv student, Theology, Medicine, and Culture Fellow, Latinx Studies Fellow, Duke Divinity School
Studies have shown that Black Americans disproportionally receive lower pain assessments and treatment recommendations for their reported levels of pain – in part due to persisting racial bias among medical practitioners.[1] Clearly, medicine has a systemic and persistent problem on its hands if race continues to be a fundamental obstacle to medicine’s objective of care. The persistence of racialization destroys the personhood of the racialized and blinds those within medicine from perceiving their own deleterious participation in racialization.
The problem may in part be attributed to an incomplete or insufficient account of personhood itself within contemporary medical ethics. Medicine, in attempting to care for persons, carries – if somewhat unwittingly – an implicit definition of personhood. The autonomous agent is often the foundation for the medical person,[2] and thus modern medical ethics emphasizes the need for autonomy to be exercised and supported in making medical decisions for a patient’s personhood to be properly recognized. Physicians and thinkers – especially Christian ones – have variously critiqued this supposedly value-neutral definition of persons as autonomous entities,[3] finding that relativistic autonomy runs into trouble when it comes to the non-autonomous/dependent, the pre-born, and the minimally conscious. However, not enough has been done to take into account the harmful and ultimately violent effects of the autonomy model of personhood on the racialized.
Thus, I endeavor to deliver a Christian ethical account of personhood through a brief examination of the imago Dei as both the image of Christ and of the Trinity – synthesizing the arguments made by Kathryn Tanner and John Zizoulas, respectively – through the lens of philosophies of race. In so doing, I hope to bring to light a useful path forward for recovering the personhood of the medically racialized by situating the medical patient as both radically individual and radically in community with others – a person that is indefinably unique and fundamentally in communion. I hope to demonstrate how this discussion of the imago Dei and philosophy of race act as a cultivation of the virtue of sight: a means by which we may begin to give medical practitioners the eyes to see the true personhood of those in front of them.
[1] Hoffman, et. al.
[2] Curlen and Tollefsen, Meador and Shuman, Beuchamp
[3] c.f. Hauerwas, McKenney, Curlen and Tollefsen, etc.
The problem may in part be attributed to an incomplete or insufficient account of personhood itself within contemporary medical ethics. Medicine, in attempting to care for persons, carries – if somewhat unwittingly – an implicit definition of personhood. The autonomous agent is often the foundation for the medical person,[2] and thus modern medical ethics emphasizes the need for autonomy to be exercised and supported in making medical decisions for a patient’s personhood to be properly recognized. Physicians and thinkers – especially Christian ones – have variously critiqued this supposedly value-neutral definition of persons as autonomous entities,[3] finding that relativistic autonomy runs into trouble when it comes to the non-autonomous/dependent, the pre-born, and the minimally conscious. However, not enough has been done to take into account the harmful and ultimately violent effects of the autonomy model of personhood on the racialized.
Thus, I endeavor to deliver a Christian ethical account of personhood through a brief examination of the imago Dei as both the image of Christ and of the Trinity – synthesizing the arguments made by Kathryn Tanner and John Zizoulas, respectively – through the lens of philosophies of race. In so doing, I hope to bring to light a useful path forward for recovering the personhood of the medically racialized by situating the medical patient as both radically individual and radically in community with others – a person that is indefinably unique and fundamentally in communion. I hope to demonstrate how this discussion of the imago Dei and philosophy of race act as a cultivation of the virtue of sight: a means by which we may begin to give medical practitioners the eyes to see the true personhood of those in front of them.
[1] Hoffman, et. al.
[2] Curlen and Tollefsen, Meador and Shuman, Beuchamp
[3] c.f. Hauerwas, McKenney, Curlen and Tollefsen, etc.