The Impetus of African Cultures on Bioethics: A Reflection on G. Tangwa And Other African Phiolosophical Responses To Bioethical Issues

Abstract

Contemporary debates on bioethical issues have tended to remain generally inconclusive and this is due in part to the fact that these issues are differentially perceived and interpreted across different indigenous cultural and ethical worldviews. These issues are cross-culturally evaluated using culture specific normative parameters and therefore reflect values that are culturally relative and diverse. These debates often portray stark disagreements between views that advocate for divergent or contradictory positions on central bioethical issues. This article, while contemplating the present and projected advances in genetic and reproductive technologies that soar beyond the traditional medical goals of healing disease and relieving suffering - coupled with the many negative consequences therein contained, attempts to give an African touch to the debates by rethinking them through the parameters of African indigenous cultural norms and values. This article employs the comparative approach to explain disagreements between western philosophical anthropologies and African philosophical anthropologies, differences that account for their divergent approaches to bioethical issues and their differential understandings of how human dignity can be respected and preserved. Western Moral Philosophy is driven by the attempt to sharply distinguish persons from the rest of the cosmos, and then to identify the ways in which they must be treated; on the contrary, the traditional African approach is different, a difference which stems from her very conception of the human person and how he or she relates with the environment. In an age in which we have become dangerously separated from our bodies - human nature itself lying on the operating table - ready for changes to be enacted upon , for eugenic and neuro-psychic enhancement in Africa, we argue for the African world’s understanding of man which opens man to who he really is, man as a corporate being in the world, with social responsibility towards others and towards the world. According to James Nelson, the job of bioethics is to assess in what respects prevailing or proposed health care policies, practices and institutions are morally defensible. As such, health care, the major object of bioethics’ study, requests that good moral reasoning should revolve around four main components namely, accurate empirical beliefs, defensible moral values, clarity about relevant concepts and finally, formally valid argumentation. The consequences are obvious: a more controlled and dignifying way of handling human beings in the arena of experimentation and a stronger belief in the fact that the human being also transcends the categories of time and space and is not merely a thing that can be tampered with.