Summary In this article, non-racism as a core value in bioethics is analysed. It is striking that both the rise of bioethics in the USA in the post-World War 2 environment, as well as in South Africa in the 1980s, were closely associated with racist incidents and reactions to them. In the USA, it was the notorious Tuskegee syphilis trials, and in South Africa, it was the suffering and death of Steve Biko as a result of maltreatment by the security police in collusion with medical professionals. The meanings of key terms such as “value”, “race”, “whiteness”, “racism” and “racialism” are analysed. In particular, the significant way in which the phenomenon of “whiteness” held and still seems to hold sway over the discipline of bioethics, and the dangers involved in that, are discussed, with special reference to the work of Samantha Vice and Catherine Myser. Bioethics as a discipline emanates from the deep seated sense that there is a difference between right and wrong acts, that good can in principle be distinguished from bad, and that this capacity of ours to submit all our acts and judgments to the criterion of obligation reveals the fact that we do not simply understand ourselves as robots functioning according to inexorable natural laws, but that as human beings we confer value on ourselves, on most other living creatures (particularly animals with person-like characteristics like the higher primates) and on the environment in general. What is intolerable is the idea of double or multiple standards of value, based on no more than race, for different groups of humans. It belongs to the essence of the value we confer on ourselves and others that we consider each and every human being as a unique centre of value that demands and justifies respect. Racism is an ideology that, in terms of what it basically propagates, insists on alleged biological differences between groups of people that in one way or another justify the inferior treatment or maltreatment of certain people and groups. Such an ideology violates all the principles of biomedical ethics, in particular the principle of respect for the autonomy of people. The article is concluded by a discussion of the problem related to the notion of “race” as variable in biomedical research, with special emphasis on the question as to how Research Ethics Committees are to go about dealing with this phenomenon when considering or deliberating about research protocols. In this discussion, the utility of a distinction between “racism” and “racialism” is considered. Many authors argue that this distinction is obscure and, in the end, does not avoid reinforcing racial stereotypes, thus perpetuating the hold that a concept such as “whiteness” has on most societies (as argued earlier). On the other hand, the distinction might be of use or even inevitable for the issue of REC's dealing with race as variable in research. It seems that, for the purposes of certain kinds of biomedical research, the acknowledgement that race does play some part in the spread of a certain condition, and that racial groups therefore require special attention in conceptualising a remedy, seems to be inevitable. In the latter case, it is arguably fairer to claim that the need for a racial distinction in order to do a certain type of biomedical research stems from racialist considerations, and certainly not from racist considerations. Broad and brief guidelines for the work of REC's in dealing with this issue are finally formulated.
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Jan 1, 2017
Sandya Surendran + 3
Open Access
