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Publication Date

2001

Abstract

The aims of this discussion are to twofold. The first is to apply what Post et al. term a cultural lens to bioethical decisionmaking processes in dementing illness.' The second is to assist the ethical advocate to develop a cultural analysis strategy for application of ethical decisionmaking processes within ethnically diverse populations. An assumption made here is that, as human inventions, ethical systems are an extension of culture, taking their imprint from the ethnocultural systems from which they emerge.' It is true that ethical systems and their principles can be widely shared across cultures. Modern bioethics, as promulgated within the United States ("U.S."), is an example of an ethical system with widespread impact, on other ethnocultural systems, well beyond the nation's boundaries. Moreover, an historical examination of comparative ethics shows that modern ethics in the U.S., and bioethics in particular, have a philosophical lineage reaching through many predecessor systems of thought, some of which date back two-and-one-half millennia to classical Greece. However, even while noting these broadening and potentially intercultural characteristics of modern bioethics, the application of a cultural analysis to bioethical thought and practice, in a multicultural social environment such as the U.S., leads to a conclusion that current bioethical schema, like other ethical systems worldwide, are culture bound and encounter difficulties when the transfer of decisionmaking principles is attempted across cultures without some form of mediating or tempering input.7 From this perspective, therefore, extant U.S. bioethical formats are going to need both conceptual and practical attention to assist in unbinding them so as to develop what can be considered culture-fair8 ethical advocacy understandings between ethnocultural groups, their affiliated members, and the bioethical advocates themselves.

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