A Theory of International Bioethics: Multiculturalism, Postmodernism, and the Bankruptcy of Fundamentalism

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Abstract
This first of two articles analyzing the justifiability of international bioethical codes and of cross-cultural moral judgments reviews “moral fundamentalism,” the theory that cross-cultural moral judgments and international bioethical codes are justified by certain “basic” or “fundamental” moral principles that are universally accepted in all cultures and eras. Initially propounded by the judges at the 1947 Nuremberg Tribunal, moral fundamentalism has become the received justification of international bioethics, and of cross-temporal and cross-cultural moral judgments. Yet today we are said to live in a multicultural and postmodern world. This article assesses the challenges that multiculturalism and postmodernism pose to fundamentalism and concludes that these challenges render the position philosophically untenable, thereby undermining the received conception of the foundations of international bioethics. The second article, which follows, offers an alternative model—a model of negotiated moral order—as a viable justification for international bioethics and for transcultural and transtemporal moral judgments. Man in the Twentieth Century can not be circumscribed by the standards of any single culture. American Anthropological Association (1948) in a statement officially denouncing the 1948 United Nation’s Declaration of Human Rights. Recently . . . so-called “liberal” medicine has revived the old rights of a clinic understood in terms of a special contract, a tacit pact made between one man and another. This patient gaze has even been attributed the power of assuming [a role in clinical decision making]. Miracles are not so easy to come by . . . . Michel Foucault (1975, p. 5) [End Page 201]

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