PHIL 235 Lecture Notes - Lecture 22: Female Genital Mutilation, Bioethics, Culture Shock
10 Apr 2020
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Document Summary
After 40 years of intense academic activity, bioethics must confess guilt for occasionally getting lost in irrelevancies or resuscitating issues that have already been settled, posing problems where there are none. Not everything that is presented as a problem is, just as there are practices that erroneously seem ethically neutral, despite hiding a problem that requires clarification. By definition bioethical deliberation presupposes the legitimacy of settling problems and dilemmas by resorting to rational argumentation. This initial indecision about the possible problematic nature of underlying cultural differences falls on the universalism / pluralism axis, Bioethics requires incorporating these new frameworks for reflection to avoid the dogmatism of deductive arguments based on maxims or principles, but also avoiding letting oneself be led to a situation ethics that is scarcely predictable and reliable. Every ethical vision has a social and cultural anchorage, is embedded in a world view, is nuanced by the biography of the person who supports it.
