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Asian Bioethics: What Is It Really? Soraj Hongladarom Department of Philosophy Chulalongkorn University Anatomy of the Question First-order judgments “Cloning should be banned.” “It is wrong to harvest kidneys from people without their consent.” Second-order judgments “Cloning should be banned because it violates human autonomy. Kidney harvesting is wrong because it runs against religious principles. “Asian” bioethics So when we talk about Asian bioethics, we need to differentiate between the two levels. People may agree about the first order, but disagree on the second, and vice versa. Usually the debates on Asian bioethics focuses on the second-order. How can agreement among different ethical systems be found? Context of Secular Ethical Theory Origin and context of Western, secular ethical system. Kant or Mill did not write with Asian audience in mind! What they did lay within the context of the European tradition. The need for secular ethics as an attempt to found ethics on a secure basis free from religious conflicts. In the same vein, Mill’s idea of utilitarianism is based on the assumption that ‘utilities’ or ‘welfare’ are universal. – There is no question as to what count as ‘utilities’ or the ‘good’ or the ‘happiness’. This is assumed. What is notable is that both thinkers did not write there works for Asian audience, or any international audience in the modern sense. They just wrote for their own readers in Europe, who already shared a lot with them. Teaching Ethics in Thailand Recently there have been some calls in Thailand for moral education which does away with religion. This may work in the West, but in Thailand even the word for ‘morality’ is based on Buddhist terminology. Thus to teach ethics without religion is empty. This shows how ethics and culture are deeply connected to each other. Westerners may overlook this because their secular system aspires to be universal but in fact lies fully within their own intellectual tradition. Western and Global Bioethics Returning to bioethics, it seems to me that we need to make a distinction between Western and global bioethics. Asian bioethics could then contribute toward the latter. For ideas to be workable across different cultures, they need to be stripped of their local contexts where they originated and take a transplanted form onto a different locale. Or the workable guidelines can be ‘grown’ from the local context itself. So is there ‘Asian’ bioethics? I think Asians should look to their own intellectual tradition to find answers to the bioethical challenges. The second-order principles may diverge, but the first-order guidelines should be more or less the same. Or at least there should be mutual understanding in cases where there deep differences. The key is ‘dialogue’: For dialogue to be possible, things cannot be totally the same because there would be no point in talking and sharing. And things cannot be totally different either, because then no common ground can be found. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Prof. Ida for his gracious invitation.