Solidarity in the Patient-Physician Relationship: Lessons from Catholic Social Teaching
Bharat Ranganathan, Beamer-Schneider Fellow in Ethics, Case Western Reserve University; Daniel Kim, PhD, Assistant Professor, Alden March Bioethics Institute, Albany Medical College
In recent work in bioethics, the concept of solidarity is increasingly being invoked, particularly in global and public health contexts and debates around equitable healthcare. The concept has become even more salient in our era of COVID and deepening social divisions. The turn to solidarity is salutary for it emphasizes the importance of thinking about our interpersonal and institutional relationships with respect to healthcare issues. But while it is associated with some notion of social cohesion, the conceptualization of solidarity in bioethics is underdeveloped, lacking the descriptive and normative “thickness” that is needed in invoking it. Bioethics would thus do well to learn from an important traditional source that has identified and developed solidarity as necessary for our lives as social animals: namely, Catholic Social Teaching (CST).
CST summarizes scriptural and magisterial teachings about matters of justice in our social lives. Developing over time and offering a normative vision of just social relations, CST draws from the collected experience of the Christian community and guides how we should see, think, and act. And as CST has developed, four principles have come to characterize it: (i) the dignity of the human person made to the imago Dei; (ii) the priority of the common good; (iii) subsidiarity as a sign of the healthy functioning of any social whole; and (iv) solidarity with one another as both a principle and a virtue. Taken together, these four principles inform an ethics and a politics, with solidarity demanding that we see and treat one another as fellow human beings and possess equal dignity.
In our paper we will proceed as follows. First, drawing especially from the encyclicals of Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis, we will discuss how solidarity has developed in the Church’s magisterial writings, especially in an era of increasing diversity and interdependence. Second, working within the CST tradition and building on the work of theologian David Hollenbach, S.J., we will distinguish between moral and intellectual solidarity. On our view, moral solidarity demands seeing each and every person, and especially the least among us, as our neighbor and acting for their benefit (cf. Matt 25.31-46). Similarly, intellectual solidarity demands “welcome[ing] foreign or strange understandings of the good life into [our] mental world in a spirit of hospitality, rather than standing on guard against them” (Hollenbach 2002, 138). Third, building on these two steps, we will explore the role solidarity should play in the patient-physician relationship. Specifically, we will argue that solidarity funds a moral-intellectual bilateralism between the patient and physician and helps avoid consumerism, on the one side, and paternalism, on the other.
CST summarizes scriptural and magisterial teachings about matters of justice in our social lives. Developing over time and offering a normative vision of just social relations, CST draws from the collected experience of the Christian community and guides how we should see, think, and act. And as CST has developed, four principles have come to characterize it: (i) the dignity of the human person made to the imago Dei; (ii) the priority of the common good; (iii) subsidiarity as a sign of the healthy functioning of any social whole; and (iv) solidarity with one another as both a principle and a virtue. Taken together, these four principles inform an ethics and a politics, with solidarity demanding that we see and treat one another as fellow human beings and possess equal dignity.
In our paper we will proceed as follows. First, drawing especially from the encyclicals of Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis, we will discuss how solidarity has developed in the Church’s magisterial writings, especially in an era of increasing diversity and interdependence. Second, working within the CST tradition and building on the work of theologian David Hollenbach, S.J., we will distinguish between moral and intellectual solidarity. On our view, moral solidarity demands seeing each and every person, and especially the least among us, as our neighbor and acting for their benefit (cf. Matt 25.31-46). Similarly, intellectual solidarity demands “welcome[ing] foreign or strange understandings of the good life into [our] mental world in a spirit of hospitality, rather than standing on guard against them” (Hollenbach 2002, 138). Third, building on these two steps, we will explore the role solidarity should play in the patient-physician relationship. Specifically, we will argue that solidarity funds a moral-intellectual bilateralism between the patient and physician and helps avoid consumerism, on the one side, and paternalism, on the other.