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Universalism and Particularism Debate in "Asian Bioethics"

In September 2003, I was invited by Prof Ryuichi Ida of Kyoto University’s Faculty of Law to an international seminar on “Dialogue and Promotion of Bioethics in Asia” at the beautiful convention centre in Kyoto, where I gave two presentations. The first one was on “Organ Transplantation from a Theravada Buddhist Perspective” and the second on “Asian Bioethics: What Is It Really?” The first presentation, on which I collaborated with my colleague Dr Sirinart Vasanavathana from the Thai Ministry of Public Health, was a small research work that reflected on how the Theravada Buddhist views the contentious issue of organ transplantation and brain death. The idea presented was that Theravada Buddhism had nothing in principle against organ transplantation and organ donation per se, provided that such acts were genuinely altruistic. The most important consideration in Buddhism, when judging whether an action is right or wrong, is the motivation behind the action. The second presentation was perhaps a more interesting one, albeit more general. In that presentation, I asked whether there was such a thing as “Asian” bioethics, and my answer was a qualifiedly negative one. It was “qualified” because in that presentation I mentioned that one needs to make a distinction between the first-order judgments on issues bioethicists are normally interested in — such as what regulations concerning human reproductive cloning should be like — and the second-order ones which concern the more philosophical approach of providing reasons or justifications of the first-order judgments. My thinking resembled that of John Rawls in his famous Political Liberalism (Rawls, 1993). In that book, Rawls argues that there should be an overlapping consensus of those who have to live together in a pluralistic society. They do