Transcript Asian Bioethics: What Is It Really?

Asian Bioethics:
What Is It Really?
Soraj Hongladarom
Department of Philosophy
Chulalongkorn University
Anatomy of the Question
 First-order judgments
 “Cloning should be banned.”
 “It is wrong to harvest kidneys from people
without their consent.”
 Second-order judgments
 “Cloning should be banned because it
violates human autonomy.
 Kidney harvesting is wrong because it runs
against religious principles.
“Asian” bioethics
 So when we talk about Asian bioethics,
we need to differentiate between the two
levels.
 People may agree about the first order,
but disagree on the second, and vice
versa.
 Usually the debates on Asian bioethics
focuses on the second-order. How can
agreement among different ethical
systems be found?
Context of Secular Ethical
Theory
 Origin and context of Western, secular
ethical system.
 Kant or Mill did not write with Asian
audience in mind!
 What they did lay within the context of
the European tradition.
 The need for secular ethics as an attempt
to found ethics on a secure basis free
from religious conflicts.
 In the same vein, Mill’s idea of
utilitarianism is based on the assumption
that ‘utilities’ or ‘welfare’ are universal. –
There is no question as to what count as
‘utilities’ or the ‘good’ or the ‘happiness’.
This is assumed.
 What is notable is that both thinkers did
not write there works for Asian audience,
or any international audience in the
modern sense. They just wrote for their
own readers in Europe, who already
shared a lot with them.
Teaching Ethics in
Thailand
 Recently there have been some calls in
Thailand for moral education which does
away with religion.
 This may work in the West, but in
Thailand even the word for ‘morality’ is
based on Buddhist terminology.
 Thus to teach ethics without religion is
empty.
 This shows how ethics and culture are
deeply connected to each other.
Westerners may overlook this because
their secular system aspires to be
universal but in fact lies fully within their
own intellectual tradition.
Western and Global
Bioethics
 Returning to bioethics, it seems to me
that we need to make a distinction
between Western and global bioethics.
 Asian bioethics could then contribute
toward the latter.
 For ideas to be workable across different
cultures, they need to be stripped of their
local contexts where they originated and
take a transplanted form onto a different
locale.
 Or the workable guidelines can be
‘grown’ from the local context itself.
So is there ‘Asian’
bioethics?
 I think Asians should look to their own
intellectual tradition to find answers to the
bioethical challenges. The second-order
principles may diverge, but the first-order
guidelines should be more or less the
same. Or at least there should be mutual
understanding in cases where there deep
differences.
 The key is ‘dialogue’: For dialogue to be
possible, things cannot be totally the
same because there would be no point in
talking and sharing.
 And things cannot be totally different
either, because then no common ground
can be found.
Acknowledgements
 I would like to thank Prof. Ida for his
gracious invitation.