Abstract

 For many, dementia disrupts basic ideas about what it means to be human, raising profound philosophical and theological questions on the nature of personhood. In this article I ask what dementia might reveal about personhood in a “secular age.” I suggest that the ill-fitting relationship between Western bioethics, with its emphasis on autonomy, and dementia throws into relief the boundaries of a secular self, and I tease out the ethical implications of the limits of those boundaries by highlighting a biopolitics of secularism. Lastly, I offer a theological account of dementia that situates dependence as a central feature of the human condition, and enriches a secular biomedical understanding of this neurocognitive disorder.
Highlights
Depending on who you ask, Margaret “Marge” Warner died sometime between 2015 and 2017. 1 Everyone agrees, that she was born in Chicago on 5 February 1934
I ask what dementia might reveal about personhood in a “secular age.”
Western minds and hearts, Englehardt continues, aspire for something deeper than a morality grounded solely in consent. Those encased within the horizons of a liberal cosmopolitan ethic confuse consent, as a source of moral authority, with individual choice, as a cardinal moral value. This confusion forms the basis for claiming that individual choice and the concepts it encompasses—liberty, autonomy, equality—are universal, taken-forgranted values, when they are associated with a particular, secular normative agenda
Summary
Depending on who you ask, Margaret “Marge” Warner died sometime between 2015 and 2017. 1 Everyone agrees, that she was born in Chicago on 5 February 1934. I ask what dementia might reveal about personhood in a “secular age.” After defining my terms and tracing a brief history of secularism and medicine, I consider the ill-fitting relationship between dementia and Western bioethics.
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