[Religious beliefs and the bioethical job]

In modern-day Spain, it is often said that possessing religious beliefs must be a hindrance in studying, investigating and teaching bioethics. Critics point to a lack of impartiality, a temptation to impose one's own beliefs and the difficulty in reaching consensus (so necessary in this field) as consequences of such a state. We analyse these so-called difficulties in this article. As regards the first criticism, we consider it a fallacy that merely intends to disqualify certain persons from participating in bioethical debate, as if no-one was not conditioned by their beliefs, disbeliefs or agnosticism. To accept this argument would be to accept the imposition of one point of view to the detriment of bioethical pluralism. Indeed, the mere acceptance would condemn bioethical dialogue, which should be based on the freedom to rationally express one's point of view so that it may be analysed by others, not rejected a priori because of where or whom it comes from. As regards the second criticism, it must be said that as long as the beliefs of an individual, whether religious, atheistic or agnostic, are put forward in a way that can be easily understood by an interlocutor, they should not be rejected out of hand but listened to as a contribution to intellectual debate. Lastly, ethical reasoning elaborated and deduced from strictly religious sources, may point to basic, universal, moral intuitions that may help in the rational discussion of bioethics without producing confusion and discord amongst thinking persons. The study also analyses the relations between minimal and maximal bioethics with the religion, emphasising that the last, especially in its Christian form and rational efforts to make the human condition more intelligible, may well be an antidote against shallow thinking that so limits the bioethical debate.