[The moral significance of religion for bioethics]

Abstract

Religion is concerned with problems of health, medicine, and disease. Conversely, concepts of health and disease reflect values that are often influenced by religious postulates. Thus, the complex ways in which religion refers to and describes health, medicine, and disease help to explain its many-sided relationship to bioethics. This article examines the manner in which religion, as a descriptive and empirical entity, and also a normative and conceptual one, has moral meaning for bioethics and can enrich it. An analysis is also made of how a particularly complex problem in bioethics--whether the medical technology available for prolonging life should be used--could be approached from the standpoint of different religious traditions.