Why East/West dichotomy is wrong

In the bioethics literature, there are many examples of this East/West dichotomy and its variations, but this is the trap we sometimes falls into when discussing the cultural dimensions of bioethics. Let us take a typical example: Hyakudai Sakamoto’s paper, entitled “Toward a New Global Bioethics,” presented at TRT 7, Tsukuba, Japan, in 2002 (Sakamoto 2002: 31-34). Sakamoto has published similar papers, and this is the latest version. Sakamoto distinguishes “Asian proper bioethics” from “Western bioethics.” He writes as follows:

Something is fundamentally different. First of all, in many countries in East and South East Asia, the sense of “human rights” is very weak and foreign, and they have no traditional background for the concept of human rights. (…) Asian people put higher value on the holistic happiness and welfare of the total group or community to which they belong rather than their individual interests (Sakamoto 2002: 32)

Then he goes on to say that Asian bioethics should be built on Asia’s own “ethos.” Its characteristics are as follows:

1) They put higher estimation on total and social well-orderedness than on the individual interests or individual rights and dignity.

2) There is no unique and absolute God, no categorical imperative, no free will, no autonomy to deduce justice and precepts to control people’s behavior except to pursue social peace. (…) Eventually, there is no room for the idea of “fundamental human rights (…).”

3) There is no antagonism between nature and human being in the depth of Asian way of thinking, and way of living.

4) This idea of invariance is somewhat foreign to traditional Asian ethos. (Sakamoto 2002: 32-33) [183/184]

Sakamoto concludes that new global bioethics should be “holistic” in contrast to European “individualistic” bioethics, and that it requires “some sort of communitarian way of thinking of a non-western or Asian type.” And finally, he stresses the importance of harmonizing the Asian ethos and the Western one.


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Cross-cultural Approaches to the Philosophy of Life in the Contemporary World
(2004)
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