Cross-Cultural Issues in Ethics: Context Is Everything

Abstract

There are several ways in which the “problem” of crosscultural difference in ethics may arise. One is where disagreement occurs about the most appropriate course of action as a result of differing cultural attitudes or beliefs: for example, where a patient or family member has reservations on the basis of religious beliefs about the use of a particular medical treatment or practice. Another is where an individual or group employs different ways of addressing or considering a problem: for example, where a wife defers to her husband to make decisions in health matters in contrast to accepted practice that emphasises that she should decide for herself. Occasionally, however, issues arise not just because of differing attitudes or habits but because there is a more fundamental cleavage between the parties involved in the discussion. In these cases, a question or problem posed by one of them may not even be understandable to another because the assumptions that have given rise to it are incommensurable. An example of this might be concerns by Australian Aboriginal people that mining activities on their tribal land will disrupt their entire cosmological balance and thereby compromise personal and social well-being, despite strenuous efforts by the company and government to provide monetary compensation. Another example is the case described by Adlan and ten Have (2012) about the value attached to truth-telling in different cultural settings in Saudi Arabia. In the Saudi case, despite taking care to obtain “informed consent” from all parties, a group of researchers came across data that indicated genetic non-paternity and felt compelled to communicate this information to the husband and wife concerned. They were, however, disconcerted by the likely disastrous consequences of discharging what they understood to be their ethical duty to tell the truth. Accordingly, they sought advice from an ethics committee that authorised them to forgo such disclosure. Putting aside the question of the extent to which the consent could have been properly informed in view of the potential profoundly damaging outcomes, as the commentaries by Lingis, Hussin, and Tsai in this issue highlight, the formation of the ethical dilemma itself is deeply shaped by the cultural and conceptual context. There are three distinct discourses operating simultaneously here, each of which generates its own— divergent—ethical injunctions. The discourse of Bioethical Inquiry (2012) 9:417–418 DOI 10.1007/s11673-012-9402-y