Intersections of Western Biomedical Ethics and World Culture: Problematic and Possibility

Abstract

Culture and ethics are inextricably bound to each other. Culture provides the moral presuppositions and ethics the formal normative framework for our moral choices. Every ethical system, therefore, is ultimately a synthesis of intuitive and rational assertions, the proportions of each varying from culture to culture. There is also in every culture an admixture of the ethnocentric and the universal that is indissolubly bound to a particular geography, history, language, and ethic strain and is common to all humans as humans.