Clinicians’ religious characteristics may strongly shape practice, particularly with respect to morally controversial interventions. Religion-associated differences may then expose the limits of what we know as “medical ethics” and require us to look beneath the surface of clinical ethical disputes to examine the deeper disagreements that lead not only to arguments about which clinical interventions are ethical, but also to arguments about how one should do medical ethics in the face of such disagreements. Join us for this discussion of how religious traditions may call conventional assumptions and practices of medical ethics into question.
Farr Curlin, MD, is Josiah C. Trent Professor of Medical Humanities, Humanities and History of Medicine and Co-Director of the Theology, Medicine and Culture Initiative at Duke Divinity School.