Taking Moral Diversity Seriously: A Discussion of the Foundations of Global Bioethics

This paper addresses the question of how to establish a theoretical framework for global bioethics capable of resolving moral conflicts over bioethical issues. By ‘moral conflict’, I mean the clash of validity claims regarding moral issues. Moral conflicts arise on the global level mainly because of the fact that people from different ethnic groups or cultures hold conflicting comprehensive doctrines, each with its own conception of morality. I shall call this the fact of ‘moral pluralism’. The notion of moral pluralism I use here is a descriptive term describing certain human conditions rather than expressing a philosophical thesis about morality. It means no more than that different ethnic or cultural groups hold conflicting comprehensive doctrines, each with its own conception of morality, and that this human condition will continue to exist for a long time or even permanently.1 It is instructive to note that, although the fact of moral pluralism is a logically contingent anthropological or cultural fact, this fact taken as a permanent feature of human condition has significant implications for how we understand the nature of moral reasoning.