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35 Between Universalism and Relativism: A Conceptual Exploration in Biomedical Ethical Guidelines Godfrey B. Tangwa Introduction Problems that arise at the level of formulation of biomedical ethical guidelines are mainly conceptual and theoretical, while those that arise at the level of application are mainly practical and procedural. At the first level, there is the need to capture clearly in concepts and language an ethical imperative and, at the second level, there is the need to translate an ethical rule or recommendation into concrete action within a specific place and time. Moral rules are different from instrumental and other rules in that, while they are indeed meant to regulate particular concrete actions in time and space, their outlook and formulation must not depend on nor be constrained by particularities but must have something of the universal and timeless about them. To say that it is morally right or wrong to do or not to do something is to imply that it is so under all other similar circumstances, irrespective of place, time, and socio-cultural context. Moral norms/rules may, of course, be expressed in, mingled /mixed with or reflected in laws, societal customs, cultural practices, taboos, etiquette, etc. But all these differ from moral norms/rules proper in that they are, by their very nature and raison d’être, context-bound. A law, for instance, has no jurisdiction and no applicability outside of its area of sovereignty and there is no reason to recommend the purely cultural practices of one society to another. One way of expressing this is to say that moral norms/rules are ‘universalisable’ or generalisable, in a similar though not exactly identical sense in which one of the main goals of biomedical research is to gain ‘generalisable knowledge’ - knowledge which is objectively rather than subjectively anchored, is in principle repeatable and applicable in all relevantly similar circumstances. Universalisability is, moreover, a 437 Tangwa: Between Universalism and Relativism defining and distinguishing mark of moral as distinguished from non-moral judgments . Moral rules are necessarily universal as well as abstract and, if their dynamic and dialectical relationship with concrete particulars is not properly appreciated, they may appear rather empty (Little 2001). A moral judgment commits the person making it to upholding the same judgment in all appropriately similar circumstances, irrespective of place, time and whoever may happen to be involved. This is very different from expedient and other judgments such as those related to ‘winning strategies’ in any game or other activity. Ethical demands are, moreover, uncompromising in a way that other demands, such as the economic, the political, the social and even the legal, are not. In these latter demands, a certain measure of expediency or inconsistency may be permissible or tolerable, whereas expediency or unjustifiable inconsistency is completely antithetical to morality. Morality has a special status which is evident from consideration of the fact that, while there is no better reason for condemning or recommending abolition or change of a law, custom, social or cultural practice than that it is morally obnoxious, no violation of a moral injunction could ever be justified on such grounds as that it is required by the law, is the social custom or usual practice. But the uncompromising and universal nature of an ethical rule or judgment does not imply that it could never justifiably be violated if the particular situation and circumstances so warrant. To a deranged potential murderer in hot pursuit of his potential victim, for example, it would be justifiable and warrantable for any third party, such as a bystander, to lie, without any implication that lying is thereby not universally morally wrong.1 Ruth Macklin (Macklin 1999) expresses this differently and quite appropriately by making a distinction between universalism and absolutism.2 Moral rules are universal but not absolute, because absolutism implies exceptionlessness, whereas human epistemological limitations make it impossible absolutely to to rule out justifiable exceptions to any such rules. Such putative exceptions, however, can in no way be the grounds for the postmodernist relativistic position that moral judgments are or ought to be entirely culture-bound or culture-dependent. In other words, accepting the possibility of justifiable exceptions to the applicability of a moral rule, in all spatio-temporal contexts and circumstances, in no way implies moral relativity, let alone the absurd idea of ‘geographical morality’ or ethics which change at territorial borders (Fidler 2001). Obeying or applying an ethical rule, however, is necessarily done within the constraints of particular place, time, circumstances and perspective...

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