Against Public-Facing Religious Bio-Restrictionism

Abstract

Recent calls to include religious bioethics on the table in policy and other public-facing contexts have been made on the grounds of respect. This paper argues that these same considerations of respect point to an obligation to exclude religious bioethics from public-facing contexts. This is because public-facing religious bioethics is typically bio-restrictionist in orientation and thus involves making demands on others that people could reasonably disagree with. At the same time, respect for persons grounds a public justification requirement according to which it is wrong to make moral demands on others that are subject to reasonable disagreement. Proponents of inclusion of these views are thereby committed to excluding such religious bio-restrictionist views from public-facing contexts.

Keywords: bio‐restrictionism; public justification; reasonable disagreement; religious bioethics; respect; social conservatism.