Asian Bioethics: What Is It Really

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Asian Bioethics What Is It Really?

• Soraj Hongladarom
• Department of Philosophy
• Chulalongkorn University

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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.

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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?

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Context of Secular Ethical Theory

• Origin and context of Western, secular ethical
  system.
• Kant or Mill did not write with Asian audience in
  mind!

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• 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.

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• In the same vein, Mills 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.

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• 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.

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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.

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• 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.

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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.

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• 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.

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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.

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• 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.

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Acknowledgements

• I would like to thank Prof. Ida for his gracious
  invitation.