Morality, Universality, and Particularity: Rethinking the Role of Community in the Foundations of Bioethics

Abstract

An assessment of bioethics at the threshold of the new millennium must begin by acknowledging the numerous competing visions of the field, as well as their divergent foundations. There is a received authorized account with a kind of governmental establishment in much of North America and the West. It regards issues both moral and bioethical within the framework of liberal cosmopolitan assumptions: morality is seen to be grounded in autonomous moral agents who contract with each other in the realization of social structures and who should favor autonomous free choice and fair equality of opportunity over particular, especially traditional familial and communal moral commitments. There is also the libertarian liberal insight that, when moral strangers meet, they will have no source of common authority other than their own consent. By default, the authority of their common undertakings as moral strangers must be understood as drawn from the permission of moral agents, not from God or from a content-full authoritative understanding of moral rationality. Unlike the cosmopolitan liberal, the libertarian liberal recognizes that the circumstance of moral pluralism within which permission is the source of authority does not support the conclusion that autonomous individual choice should have a value over other goods, including those celebrated within the context of traditional moral communities.