African Communitarian Bioethics and the Question of Paternalism

Abstract

Bioethics is a field of study and professional practice, variously conceptualized fashionably as: multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, pluriperspectivity and integrativity. Despite being a professional practice that bioethicists engage with everyday, bioethics in Africa is still poorly characterized both methodologically and pedagogically as its discourse is still narrowly focused and its worldviews are increasingly alienated and marginalized from mainstream. Core bioethical values and principles from Africa are among the most under-theorized, under-researched, under-valued and under-discussed aspect in mainstream bioethics and professional practice. This is the case with communitarian bioethics whose philosophical foundations and normative underpinnings, moral theories and principles are still largely unexplored, and the solid pillars not yet firmly implanted as scepticism characterize its future. But dominant mainstream bioethical values are portrayed as the only valid universal ideal and Western bioethicists still struggle to ‘remake’ or ‘recreate’ the discipline according to their cultural and ethical traditions’. Confronted with this crisis of negation of identity, self affirmation and the quest for authenticity, this work is a radical critique of the foreign oppressive systems and structures of power that serve to define African existence in certain erroneous beliefs, paradigm and the consequent alienation of its worldview. It critically examines how mainstream bioethical values become a universal code of knowledge, intelligence, superiority, orderliness, purity and how it functions as a master sign. How it creates values, norms, and epistemic frames of reference that unilaterally affirm its many modes of instantiation—political, institutional, aesthetic, and so forth. Additionally, while investigating why bioethics is not experiencing a revolutionary transformation in Africa, work argues that genuine development of bioethics in Africa must be rooted on core communitarian ethical principles and must rest upon the innate authentic African communitarian theories.