Why Should Medicine Care About Religion? An Argument Concerning Foundations
Daniel Kim, MA, MPH, PhD Candidate, University of Chicago Divinity School
Why should medicine care about religion? Several practical reasons are commonly proposed. Studies show that most American patients are religious and want more spiritual attention, and that spiritual attention is the single strongest predictor of patient dissatisfaction. Physicians too are feeling alienated from any higher purpose within a medical culture that is dominated by a functional positivism and an instrumentalist ethic; their well-being is thus also at stake. There is also ample evidence that the religious concerns of patients and physicians are impacting clinical decisions and outcomes, and should be accounted for.
These are all good reasons. They speak to why American medicine would do well—practically speaking—to take religion into account. However, these reasons do not get at the ethics of the matter. When medicine fails to care about religion, it may be acting suboptimally, but it is not acting unethically. In other words, these reasons tend to presume that religion is of instrumental value to medicine. Religion is conceived not as an intrinsic part of the foundational goals of medicine but as an optional variable of medical excellence.
In this presentation, I propose to argue that religion is constitutive of an adequate vision of medical foundations. Working with a basic assumption that medicine is at root a response to human need, I critically and comparatively engage the philosophical anthropologies of Harry Frankfurt and Augustine, which center on the importance of what we care about—what we love. In so doing, I claim that religion is constitutive of a just sociality that we, as social beings, rightly care about. We are social beings, and precisely as such, we are also religious beings. The idea is to show that the social and the religious cannot be separated, and that religious concerns thus necessarily belong within the scope of medicine. In other words, I argue that religion is not just another optional variable that a socially conscious medicine might consider for its end. Rather, religion is intrinsic to that end, and is thus a matter of its ethical responsibility.
Why should medicine care about religion? Several practical reasons are commonly proposed. Studies show that most American patients are religious and want more spiritual attention, and that spiritual attention is the single strongest predictor of patient dissatisfaction. Physicians too are feeling alienated from any higher purpose within a medical culture that is dominated by a functional positivism and an instrumentalist ethic; their well-being is thus also at stake. There is also ample evidence that the religious concerns of patients and physicians are impacting clinical decisions and outcomes, and should be accounted for.
These are all good reasons. They speak to why American medicine would do well—practically speaking—to take religion into account. However, these reasons do not get at the ethics of the matter. When medicine fails to care about religion, it may be acting suboptimally, but it is not acting unethically. In other words, these reasons tend to presume that religion is of instrumental value to medicine. Religion is conceived not as an intrinsic part of the foundational goals of medicine but as an optional variable of medical excellence.
In this presentation, I propose to argue that religion is constitutive of an adequate vision of medical foundations. Working with a basic assumption that medicine is at root a response to human need, I critically and comparatively engage the philosophical anthropologies of Harry Frankfurt and Augustine, which center on the importance of what we care about—what we love. In so doing, I claim that religion is constitutive of a just sociality that we, as social beings, rightly care about. We are social beings, and precisely as such, we are also religious beings. The idea is to show that the social and the religious cannot be separated, and that religious concerns thus necessarily belong within the scope of medicine. In other words, I argue that religion is not just another optional variable that a socially conscious medicine might consider for its end. Rather, religion is intrinsic to that end, and is thus a matter of its ethical responsibility.