Abstract
African ethical theories tend to hold that moral agents ought to be partial, in the sense that they should favour members of their family or close community. This is considered an advantage over the impartiality of many Western moral theories, which are regarded as having counterintuitive implications, such as the idea that it is unethical to save a family member before a stranger. The partiality of African ethics is thought to be particularly valuable in the context of bioethics. Thaddeus Metz, in particular, argues that his African-derived theory best accounts for a number of plausible intuitions, such as the intuition that health care practitioners ought to be biased towards the patients for whom they are directly responsible. In this article, I claim that the plausible intuitions drawn on in favour of partiality can be satisfactorily explained on the basis of impartial moral theories. Moreover, I argue that blanket acceptance of partiality has problematic consequences for distributive justice in resource allocation in biomedical contexts. By contrast, impartial theories can justify plausible instances of partiality whilst avoiding the pitfalls of fully partial moral theories. Although this provides grounds for abandoning partiality in principle, I claim that this finding should not be seen as damaging to African medical ethics. Instead, it prompts investigation of underexplored possibilities of impartial African moral theories. To demonstrate the value of this direction, I sketch some novel and attractive conceptions that combine impartiality with elements of African ethics.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to the participants at the ‘Giving a Voice to African Thought in Medical Research Ethics’ conference held in Johannesburg by the University of Johannesburg and the University of the Witwatersrand in 2015. I am particularly grateful to Thaddeus Metz and Kevin Behrens for helpful conversations before, during, and after the event.
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Wareham, C.S. Partiality and distributive justice in African bioethics. Theor Med Bioeth 38, 127–144 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-017-9401-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-017-9401-4