African American Bioethics: Culture, Race, and Identity

Introduction: Culture and Bioethics:Where Ethics and Mores Meet

INTRODUCTION Culture and Bioethics: Where Ethics and Mores Meet Edmund D.Pellegrino “C U L T U R E”is perhaps the slipperiest concept in the social sciences.1 Some years ago, Kroeber and Kluckhohn collected 164 definitions.2 Of the many definitions available, we believe Kuper best captures the connotations of the word in his crisp characterization of culture as a “collective cast of mind.”3 In this book we have taken a“collective cast of mind”to be a summation of all those things that give identity to persons, nations, ethnic groups, and organizations. Under this rubric we include all those things humans value, those things that define them as who they are, what they perceive themselves to be and want to be. These are the things they value enough to work for, live for, and die for. These are things that define their view of the good life and shape their morals, that is, their judgments of right and wrong, good and evil. Every human and every group has its own perception of a specific con- figuration of values and beliefs that reflects its history, life experiences, and aspirations . Humans belong to many “cultures” in this sense: to a nation, family , club, political party, and so on. No two persons have precisely the same “cast of mind” as the others who share their “culture.” However, it is in those things that are held in common that the profile of a culture is established. African Americans, therefore, like all Americans, have a collective cast of mind on some things and individualized perspectives on many others. The ix essays in this collection indicate that two experiences in the lives of black Americans in the United States seem to be shared in common. One is the experience of color discrimination, the scars of slavery, and the depreciation of black people as human beings by the dominant culture. The other is the collective memory of their African roots, with its many unique cultures and customs transmitted from previous generations. Certain features of these two experiences are shared and produce the “epistemological stance” about which J. L. A. Garcia writes in chapter 1. As the individual accounts of the essayists attest, African Americans as individuals weight these experiences sometimes differently in their own lives. So, while there is a collective cast of mind, it must not be interpreted as a stereotype lest it become a caricature to those who have not had the same experiences. Included in any cast of mind is the intersection and tensions between customs and practices, between their mores and the rational justification for those practices, that is, their ethics. Recently and belatedly, bioethicists have begun to recognize this fact. Social scientists and humanists have urged that socioeconomic, political, and historical realities must be taken into account in bioethics.4 Now the question for bioethicists is to discern how much weight should be given to each individual’s and each group’s customs and practices. Evolution of Bioethics Modern bioethics is barely thirty-five years old. It grew out of a 2,500-year tradition of medical ethics. Little or no formal justification of these ancient norms from a small group of Greek physicians took place until the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then theologians and philosophers undertook a critical and formal analysis of received norms and of new challenges to those norms. In the 1980s, humanists and social scientists expanded our understandings of the moral life. Bioethics became an interdisciplinary enterprise, which it is still today. One result of the multidisciplinary approach has been a much richer comprehension of the complexities of moral decision and accountability.5 Another result is exposure of the tensions that can arise between the ways social sciences and the ways philosophy and theology view moral problems and issues.6 Moral philosophers have generally focused on universal principles and norms based on a common human nature shared by all humans. Social sciEdmund D. Pellegrino x Culture and Bioethics entists have focused on particular expressions of these norms with heavy reliance on descriptive and empirical studies. A conceptual question for bioethics in the years ahead is how to accommodate these two approaches and take advantage of each without one capitulating to the other. This tension surfaces when cultural beliefs about right and good come into conflict with the more generally promulgated ethical norms of bioethics. How...