A pragmatic approach to multicultural/international bioethics

Summary In Swift's Gulliver's Travels, each nation thinks that it is It. “It” being defined here as a sociocentric position in which one's social group, in this case, a country, is believed to be superior to every other group in regards to the former's values and principles. Of course, if the society has the best values and principles possible – or possible within the given context – then its members have a moral obligation to not only uphold their code but to try to convince other societies to adopt it as well. Sociocentrism becomes problematic when citizens cannot change their minds even in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence that their cultural beliefs are false. In the case of Lilliput and Gulliver, for example, the approximately six-inch tall Lilliputians continued to believe that they comprised the most powerful nation on Earth in the face of evidence that the “Man-Mountain” could easily destroy their entire civilization merely by eating them out of existence, and that his sheer power could not be controlled by the Lilliputian army and navy combined. Yet, the Lilliputian emperor still referred to himself in power terms that France's Louis XIV would have found excessively aggrandizing. The same affliction is experienced by many in the developed world when it comes to thinking about morality. Non-First World countries are often perceived as being backward or underdeveloped not only in their industry and markets, but in their social conventions and morality. At times, this claim is accurate. The treatment of women as chattel, slavery as a practice, abuse of those with unpopular sexual orientations, or other morally irrelevant characteristics is to be condemned as wicked. They show a defect in the person's moral values or principles that requires rectification, and possibly, amends being made. On the other hand, there are many social norms that offend developed world citizens but may only be the result of squeamishness with the socially different, e.g, polyamory and arranged marriages, and health care practices. Each of these could and are morally wrong in certain circumstances, but we can imagine situations in which they are morally permissible. Much, but not all, of what ISIL does is morally reprehensible, but why its leaders act in a certain way is understandable. ISIL society shares a very similar belief with ancient China's Mandate of Heaven: anyone with the mandate could do anything he wanted because what he was doing had to be favored by Tiān. The fact the person was in power was sufficient evidence that the mandate was upon him, and when he began to lose power, that meant that the mandate had been removed. Given some Sunni belief systems, possessing Western freedoms with social disruption is eschewed. For many, it is better to have 100 years of security without freedom than 1 day of freedom without security. Therefore, authoritarian rule that does not go to excess too many times is to be preferred, which explains why an ISIL force of a mere 10,000–30,000 was able to take and control Mosul, a city of 1.5 million inhabitants. In what follows I will argue for why a pragmatic approach needs to be taken toward bioethics, especially when it comes to interactions between cultures and nations. Along the way, an explanation for why this approach is the most reasonable will be sketched out using the foundation of evolutionary adaptation and advantage, neurophysiology, and how morality actually works. The result will be a moral theory that rejects the notion that there is one right solution or position on a matter, and replaces it with the more nuanced positon that there can be many right actions and good values that depend, in part, on the situation's context. What I am proposing is not cultural relativism in which each society is its own measure of morality, but rather a pragmatic position that evaluates based on whether something works sufficiently well in the situation to reasonably have the potential to achieve flourishing.