On Religious Influence in Bioethics: The Limits of Pluriversalism

The World Congress of Bioethics held in Qatar in 2024 (WCB 2024) sparked controversy around the role of religion in bioethics, highlighting the need for critical discussions. During the congress, there was a strong push for incorporating religious values into bioethical discourse, raising questions about the validity and implications of such an approach. This paper examines the influence of religious thought on bioethical discussions, and the ongoing debate over the role of religious perspectives in this field. Here, we explore Jecker and colleagues’ pluriversal framework, which was proposed at WCB 2024, espousing a bioethical discourse grounded in civility, respect for law, justice, non-domination, and toleration. While the framework aims to embrace the world’s cultural and religious diversity, here, we suggest that it struggles with significant ethical inconsistencies, poses challenges for pluralistic dialogue, and may be hard to reconcile with human rights. Through an analysis of Jecker’s principles and their application, we discuss the difficulty of integrating conflicting religious views with ethical values and with widely accepted human rights frameworks. We then proceed to examine how and why religions might exert undue influence on bioethics, and we argue for a different future for bioethics.