Bioethics and secularism: rebuilding bridges between sciences and humanities

Abstract

In Van Rensselaer Potter’s book, “Bioethics: bridge to the future”, he emphasized the need for a new discipline that would establish a bridge between the sciences and the humanities, which he called bioethics. However, despite the rapid development of bioethics as a discipline (or interdiscipline), it can still be seen that bioethics is greatly influenced by biomedical content, and is even medicalized to a certain extent, thus raising doubts about its humanist configuration. It can be understood that this is not a practice in line with Potter’s original proposal, considering that, as a link between the sciences and the humanities, bioethics should not take up sectorial positions, ideologies, dogmas or doctrines, but should definitively embrace plurality and diversity in their broadest sense. Thus, secularism ”“ as a proposal for all members of society to live together regardless of their ethnic origin, religion, beliefs, non-beliefs and sexual orientation, among other freedoms of conscience ”“ may assist in revising the dimensions of this bridge, which today is under re(construction). Therefore, this paper proposes areflection on the vicissitudes of bioethics, as a bridging discipline between the sciencesand the humanities, and the contribution that secularism, as a tool for living together, may provide for this objective of bioethics, in the light of real day-to-day experience.