Against culturally sensitive bioethics

Abstract

This article discusses the view that bioethics should become "culturally sensitive" and give more weight to various cultural traditions and their respective moral beliefs. It is argued that this view is implausible for the following three reasons: it renders the disciplinary boundaries of bioethics too flexible and inconsistent with metaphysical commitments of Western biomedical sciences, it is normatively useless because it approaches cultural phenomena in a predominantly descriptive and selective way, and it tends to justify certain types of discrimination. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.